Review: Protector v3.1

For: Granular policies provide flexibility and high-end security.
Against: Policy management can become difficult due to the high flexibility, and client deployment requires either manual intervention or GPO. There is no actual client deployment tool.
Verdict: Good product with excellent documentation and good value for any size enterprise.

At the media level this product can provide encryption to removable USB keys and also forensic reporting of all data moving in and out of the organisation. At the interface or port level it can restrict based on existing Active Directory users or computers. Devices can also be restricted based on type, model or a specific serial number.

Installation of this product was quite simple and took only a few minutes. The set-up wizard was easy to follow and made the actual set-up easy and intuitive. Once the product was installed, we were able to access the management console.

The actual interface of the management console was easy to navigate with a simple tab top layout. However, policy management was a little more complex. The policies can be set for a lot of granularity, and while this is excellent for device control, we found it to be a little difficult to use at first.

Also slightly tricky is client deployment. Clients can be deployed either manually or by a domain group policy object (GPO). A domain GPO is an excellent way of deploying the clients, but we would have liked an actual deployment tool as well.

With simple integration with Active Directory this product can be an easy way to control both removable media and the actual ports on specific machines. This product also provides a lot of specific detail for policy granularity and total control of the environment.

Documentation provided with this product consists of two easy to read guides. The installation guide illustrates not just actual installation, but highlights many of the useful features of Protector.

Safend offers web-based email support as part of the product’s one year maintenance agreement, which is 20 per cent of the perpetual software license cost. Maintenance is included in Safend’s term licenses and assures customer access to all bug fixes, updates and version releases for one year.

At US$32 per seat, scaled for volume depending on size of implementation, this product is a good value for most size enterprises.

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