Symantec Endpoint Security vs. Trellix Endpoint Security vs. BigFix

How various endpoint security solutions compare and what users look for in such products are questions that are not easy to answer.

PeerSpot takes a user-centered approach to creating product comparisons that help IT decision-makers arrive at informed decisions. Instead of relying on the word of the companies that create the technological solutions, they go to the users themselves. Real users offer true feedback without any of the partiality that the solutions’ vendors may have. Below PeerSpot users offer their opinions of Symantec Endpoint Protection, Trellix Endpoint Security, and BigFix.

Symantec Endpoint Protection

Q: What are its valuable features?

A: “All the features are great with the core being antivirus, spyware, Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Machine Learning, and capabilities like reputation analysis based on their huge footprint, firewall, IPS and device control are very useful at protecting the environment. Unfortunately many companies just use the basic, out of the box solution. Even when they turn on the firewall, they will use it just with its default settings, but if you really learn how to use it and deploy it correctly, it provides much more protection. With Symantec adopting the AI and many of the new protection features like file-less attacks and other modern technologies, it's very attractive and makes a big difference. EPPs by nature have so many parts to it, they can be daunting, even to those with experience, but once deployed it's quite easy to use.

This is a very complete solution. It has all the pieces that you need. Like many companies, Symantec also sells an EDR solution, and it is a feature you'd want to add to an endpoint solution.”

-- A senior professional services engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Q: How are customer service and technical support?

A: “Technical support is a bit of an issue. In Brazil, when we need technical support we use a partner. Every time that we contact Symantec, it will take a long time to get the answer. The primary contact is the partner who implements the software here. It's a local company from Brazil that handles all the support information and services for us. We just needed to make contact with Symantec one time, however the answer was so long that the partner got the answer to us first and therefore we really stopped trying to directly reach out.”

-- Information technology director at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Q: Where do you see Room for Improvement?

A: “Today, it's just a question of understanding the update package of the operating system as the antivirus software in and of itself is not enough. This is due to the fact that if I have not updated Windows, I have a huge breach of security. The idea for us, from our point of view, is that the antivirus needs to understand how Windows is safe. If the operating system is safe, the antiviral has less work to do. From a security point of view, both of them need to work together. It's not just the task of the antivirus to keep all the computers safe. The operating system needs to be updated too. The operating system and the antivirus need to communicate better with each other and exchange information so that I know everything is secure. It needs to be more clear when things aren't aligned and need to be repaired, in order to avoid the risk of a security breach.”

-- An information technology director at a communications service provider with 10,001+ employees

Trellix Endpoint Security

Q: What are its Valuable Features?

A: “From the McAfee side, I really like the ePolicy Orchestrator software that allows us to manage all of our endpoints. You can create the deployment policies and whenever there is a new update — a new version of the ENS Agent, or threat protection — we could test it out in the evaluation branch, and even test it on some of our servers.

It's quite easy to manage. Quite intuitive. I would say the dashboard of ePolicy Orchestrator software is quite intuitive and quite easy to understand and manage.”

-- An information technology infrastructure manager at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Q: What do you think about the stability of the solution?

A: “The initial setup was simple and the deployment itself was straightforward. There was no complexity in terms of the architecture or the initial deployment of the solution. I came into the organization when McAfee was already deployed. However, I've set up some other packages. For example, although McAfee was already deployed, the USB blocking features module took about two months I would say to deploy across the network. We have a team of approximately four people who deploy patches and updates and generally maintain the solution.”

-- Vice president of cyber-security at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Q: Where do you see Room for Improvement?

A: “I also think the detailed level of the detection could be better. In some cases, it's very complicated to figure out which file is the one that is actually impacted, depending on the dashboard you see. The dashboard is one of the most important things in the ePO because it's where you can see everything in a central location. But sometimes, you need to change from one view to another view to find what you're looking for.”

-- Manuel O., a support security engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

BigFix

Q: What are its Valuable Features?

A: “BigFix is based on the principle of whether something is relevant or not. The system works more or less like a complex database that sends small messages to the endpoints and asks them to report back to the server. If a given condition is true, then it's relevant and the server will ask the client for something. It's as simple as that. Therefore, BigFix is an extrempower solution when it supports more than 90 different OS. The system can manage whatever you want!”

-- Paul A., a marketing coordinator and project manager at Attend IT AS

Q: Did you consider any other solutions?

A: “Other systems like Microsoft SCCM have been considered. These systems are too complex and require too many resources compared with BigFix. The BigFix server with the SQL server included could be running on a single portable workstation and manage the patch-management of thousands of endpoints. How many SCCM do you need to do that? With Bigfix you can manage a small office with 10 clients as well as an enterprise environment with 250 000 endpoints with only one BigFix-server.”

-- Paul A., a marketing coordinator and project manager at Attend IT AS

Q: Where do you see Room for Improvement?

A: “The ability to handle removable media encryption on the removable media label, et cetera, is lacking due to the fact that you cannot really control your USB device. Of course, recently, we had a use case where we had to lock down the USB devices, but there were, for instance, certain machines that were on a very specific model of USB drives that had a license key. This customer was using licensed software, and the license was on the USB stick. Now, the USB stick must be in the machine the whole time in order to use the application.”

-- Frans D., a security solutions architect at Thuthukani Technology Solutions

Read more of the latest endpoint protection reviews by PeerSpot users.