Review: F-Secure Client Security 8

The F-Secure Policy Manager was easy to use and installed in about 30 minutes. The Policy Manager was capable of managing our anti-virus and client security application, but it also comes equipped with an advanced mode to manage other F-Secure products.

The Policy Manger did everything we wanted it to do - from Active Directory integration to discovery and management of our endpoints, centralized web-based reporting, alerting and policy creation and management. Another feature we liked was that it did not require us to load a separate database. At first we saw this as a plus from the ease of deployment aspect and a negative from a historical reporting aspect. The negative went away when we learned that there is support for syslog event data forwarding.

The client side was very impressive. The DeepGuard Host-Based Intrusion Prevention feature was stellar. DeepGuard 2.0, the reputation based real-time protection network, assists the behavioral heuristics with network-based reputation, increased scanning performance, and reduces the time to deliver detections for new threats. The firewall feature was easy to use and gave the user numerous options for creating profiles for different office and mobile environments. The ability to view the firewall logging on the desktop was a nice feature as well. F-Secure Client Security protects against viruses and other malicious code, worm attacks, spyware, adware, rootkits, zero-hour threats, and the use of forbidden networking software in the company.

The documentation was very detailed and gave us everything we needed to install and manage our test environment.

The license fee includes standard support and product maintenance for one year. There are fee-based support options available. The standard support only provides three-day email turnaround and 24/5 phone support.

This tool offers a large amount of protection, ease of use and management, all for a fair price.

For: Nice management, great endpoint protection and easy to use. Against: Support is good but only available 24/5. Verdict: Very nice solution for any size organization. Provides a diverse yet integrated offering, protecting the endpoints against today’s new breed threats. This is a solid product and we give it our Best Buy designation this month.