April 10, 2006

New Security Options to Consider: Microsoft or McAfee, Trend Micro, Symantec...?

McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, Computer Associates are well known security vendors offering an array of hosted and software based online security solutions for small businesses. The BIG CHANGE is that Microsoft, in June, will officially enter the market and launch Windows One Care Live - $50 a year for 3 computers. Not bad.

As would be expected Trend Micro (and I'm sure other vendors) are showing why their solutions are better. Are they?

I haven't looked closely at this space yet but think that version 1.0 of Microsoft's offering might not be the best. It is a FIRST for Microsoft and everyone needs some time to start off. Maybe this first version will be almost perfect though...it has been in beta for some weeks now.

However, in the coming weeks as Microsoft's offering gets better and more refined don't be surprised to see Microsoft's lower cost offering better or at least equal to the other offerings.

Cnet writes "Security is hard--we have been doing this for 15 years. We have over 10 patents that are focused right at security. We think we have a pretty significant lead in what we are doing. Security is not something you do part-time," Weiss said.

Weiss cited an example of how he believes Microsoft's thinking is fundamentally flawed when it comes to security: "If you are in an airport lounge and they have a PC that lets people do their e-mail remotely, look at how many Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents get downloaded - Microsoft doesn't allow you to look at those documents without downloading them to the PC. That is, for me, an indication that they don't think about security all the time," said Weiss.

For the time being I'm going to continue with Trend Micro. I had been using Symantec Anti Virus for years but switched to Trend Micro for a review and never switched back.

0 comments