Burton Group’s Enterprise Antivirus Selection Criteria

Enterprise AV selection considerations, according to Burton Group analyst Dan Blum:

– Price. Inquire about annual subscription costs and additional charges for antispyware, cleaning, host intrusion protection system capabilities, etc. Ask whether suite pricing is flexible if you don’t require every module.

– Scanning engine. Are there multiple agents for antivirus, antispyware, application control, etc.? If so, do they cause management or performance inefficiencies?

– Behavior-blocking functionality. Does the system monitor system calls to prevent vulnerability exploitation attempts?

– System firewall. Does it provide blacklists and whitelists for addresses and domains?

– Application control (whitelisting). Does it provide up-to-date and customizable whitelists and blacklists? A learning engine?

– Cleaning/remediation. Does it provide virus, spyware and difficult rootkit cleaning?

– Client updates. How large and frequent are signature and other updates? This can range from one per day to multiple updates per day.