We had Sophos for 4 years. We are installing Vipre right now. Here are my observations so far:
1) On the initial Vipre deep scans a lot of machines are reporting high or severe risks. At this point I can't say conclusively whether Vipre is doing a better job, if Vipre is just more sensitive or if there was a problem with our Sophos configuration (there were no indications of problems). It does not appear that we are getting false positives. 2) We have seen performance improvements since moving to Vipre. On our older machines when Sophos was running a full scan, it noticeably slowed the systems (in some cases to the point of being unusable). We have not noticed similar performance issues with Vipre. 3) Vipre support has been very good. Because we were an enterprise customer they remoted in and helped us setup and configure the product for no additional charge. We have already found some bugs, though, most notably the AD auto-discovery process does not work - we are having to manually push out deployment and it can only be done an OU at a time, plus as we add machines we have to go back and do it again since they are not picking up. This is supposedly being fixed in the next release and has a workaround, though it is somewhat of an inconvenience. 4) Vipre has a good notification system - you can control how/when you are alerted. We have ours set up to send me an e-mail whenever a severe threat is detected on a machine - which so far has been very nice. I don't get nagging e-mails everything an insignificant threat is found and I know when I DO get an e-mail it is something that needs immediate attention and it doesn't get lost in the shuffle. 5) Vipre has done a good job with the removal process of old AV software - it has successfully removed Sophos and MS Defender from all machines we have deployed to so far. I have not tried it on servers, though - I'm still doing those manually. 6) Vipre was just acquired by GFI. It is clear GFI was looking for desktop AV/AS solutions so I think the future of Vipre is fairly secure (not so sure about the pricing structure, though). I am a little concerned about the future of the Exchange piece that we purchased as well as some of the other Sunbelt products. Overall we have been pleased with Vipre since we started piloting in March. Mass deployment (approx 1000 workstations) is not going quite as smoothly as we would like but it has been acceptable. We are still in the early stages of implementation so I could not give full recommendation yet but so far we have no regrets! -TS Thomas C. Steele Technology Director Manteno CUSD #5 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian Tobin Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 9:28 AM To: [email protected]; Technology Coordinators Subject: [tech-geeks] Sophos vs Viper Ok, So we've got a 3 year quote from Sophos and a 3 year quote from DeepFreeze (reselling Viper). Sophos has come back and slid under Viper, and want us to use the DeepFreeze Igloo app to get it to work correctly. Viper is integrated into DeepFeeze console. Let's just say both are provided ridiculous good pricing for 2500 systems. Anyone have a recommendation of one verses the other? We had Sophos in here years ago, but the pricing got out of control. We've been testing Viper and it seems to be working well. Thoughts? Brian Tobin DeKalb Community Unit School District 428 901 s 4th st DeKalb, IL 60115 [email protected] [email protected] W815.754.2284 M302.468.6246 | Subscription info at http://www.tech-geeks.org | | Subscription info at http://www.tech-geeks.org |
