Trend Micro Enterprise Protection Strategy By Jay Munro April 22, 2003

• Product: Trend Micro Enterprise Protection Strategy
• Direct Price: For 25 users, support included, $2,425 per year
• Company Info: Trend Micro Inc., 800-228-5651, 408-257-1500, www.trendmicro.com

Editor Rating:

Trend Micro Enterprise Protection Strategy (EPS) delivers centrally managed, comprehensive protection without sacrificing each component's autonomy. The U.S. leader in corporate gateway antivirus software (according to a 2002 Gartner Research report), Trend Micro emphasizes its outbreak management and policy enforcement, claiming that most of the cost of fighting viruses lies in the sometimes long process of cleanup. A Web-based interface that lets you administer from anywhere and the best rollback capabilities of the bunch earn EPS our Editors' Choice.

The EPS line offers a desktop-to-gateway solution combined with an extensive support network. You can use any of the products alone or manage them with the Trend Micro Control Manager (TMCM). TMCM can schedule updates down to 5-minute intervals and offers a quick rollback for both clients and servers. In addition to virus scanning, EPS's e-mail products offer eManager for content and spam filtering.

Like McAfee AVD, EPS uses local agents on each of its modules to deploy, monitor, and manage network AV and content filtering. Its superior Outbreak Manager can set and enforce policies like blocking all e-mail attachments for 48 hours during a virus attack. TMCM manages servers—controlling updates, getting reports, and providing detailed control—by exposing each server's console. The Web-based TMCM lets you administer remotely.

OfficeScan Corporate Edition provides desktop protection with comprehensive control. Unlike the other products here, the OfficeScan server console works locally or through TMCM.

OfficeScan sets options, privileges, and schedules, and it pushes client installations that uniquely uninstall existing client AV products first. No agents are required for client communication.

Like McAfee's corporate product, ServerProtect scans all file types, including compressed files and floppy disks, and performs heuristic macro trapping by default. Also as with the McAfee product, you can scan just outgoing files or in both directions. ServerProtect can write-protect specific directories from the console.

ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange provides strong e-mail server protection. Like Symantec's Exchange product, it offers scanning, attachment blocking, and content filtering. Unlike the other products here, ScanMail can download a local copy of updates to share with clients or other servers. Information-starved administrators will love its thorough logging, with filtered views and CSV export.

InterScan Messaging Security Suite (IMSS) is the only gateway product in this roundup that offers both SMTP and POP3 protection. Like the McAfee and Symantec products, IMSS offers heuristic and archive scanning. But it goes beyond these by letting administrators set message size, session data size, number of connections, and queue load limits, sizes, and locations to optimize throughput. The policy manager lets you create address groups for policy setting.

Support comes in a wide range of choices, from friendly toll-free support to a dedicated on-your-premises paid Technical Account Manager (TAM). A unique 2-hour pattern file guarantee pays you if you don't get a fix in 2 hours for a virus sample you submit.

For great end-to-end antivirus coverage, with unique strengths in outbreak containment, you need look no further than EPS. Its TMCM Outbreak Commander, detailed help, custom policies, and extensive support make it a good choice for busy administrators.