Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 provides best protection, performance in virtual environments

BANGALORE, INDIA: Symantec Corp. announced the availability of Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 as well as results from independent tests demonstrating that the product outperforms the competition in both virtual and physical environments, providing unrivaled protection and blazingly fast performance.

According to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, attackers unleashed more than 286 million distinct malicious programs in 2010, creating a challenge for traditional signature-based security solutions that can’t keep up with this volume of attacks. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition are now available to combat the sheer volume of sophisticated attacks targeting organizations of all sizes today.

Symantec engaged with a number of well-known third-party testing organizations to benchmark Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 against competing products in the areas of protection and performance. These tests evaluated products in both virtual environments, particularly highly consolidated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments, as well as physical environments.

Recent testing performed by Dennis Labs demonstrates that Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 running in a VDI environment defended against more real-world threats than comparable solutions from McAfee and Trend Micro. In addition, The Tolly Group measured the performance of these solutions in VDI environments, determining that Symantec completes an on-demand scan in about half the time with 49 percent less disk bandwidth when compared to solutions from McAfee and Trend Micro.

In addition, Symantec Endpoint Protection required 20 percent less disk bandwidth when performing on-access scanning compared to Trend Micro’s agentless DeepSecurity solution.

In real-world security tests performed by AV-Test.org in physical environments, Symantec protected better than comparable solutions from Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos and Trend Micro. In recent Passmark Software Performance Benchmarks, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 performed faster than competing solutions from Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos and Trend Micro. Passmark conducted the same evaluation for Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition against comparable solutions from ESET, Kaspersky, McAfee and Trend Micro; again, Symantec received the top performance scores.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12: To provide unmatched protection against today’s sophisticated threat landscape, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 uses Insight, Symantec’s award-winning community and cloud-based reputation technology, to detect and block new threats earlier and more accurately than any other corporate security product.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 also leverages Insight to reduce the overhead of virus scanning by as much as 70 percent by automatically identifying and whitelisting Symantec-trusted high-reputation files, eliminating significant scanning activity from each endpoint.

In addition, SONAR, the world’s first hybrid behavioral-reputation engine, monitors running applications for suspicious behaviors to block zero-day and highly targeted threats in real-time. Symantec’s intrusion prevention system (IPS) technology blocks attacks at the network layer, before they can do damage to a computer. Together, these technologies make Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 the fastest, most effective, corporate endpoint security product on the market.

Optimized for performance on virtual systems, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 can automatically identify and manage virtual machines (VMs). Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 also integrates directly with VMware’s security APIs to scan for malware inside offline VMware images. To alleviate concurrent scans, known as ‘AV Storms,’ from impacting performance in dense virtual environments, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 whitelists baseline VM images and shares scan results across VMs so that identical files only need to be scanned once across an entire pool.

When combined with the scanning elimination from Insight, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 enables faster, more responsive host systems, which in turn supports greater density of virtual instances, particularly for highly consolidated VDI environments.

Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition: Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition employs the same Insight, SONAR and IPS technologies to offer enterprise-class threat detection technologies and performance improvements for small business customers. With simple-to-use features such as an installation wizard, pre-configured policy settings and automated notifications and reports, Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition meets smaller organizations’ needs with the fastest, most effective anti-malware capabilities in the industry. Small businesses will have peace of mind that their data is safe from cybercriminals, so that they can stay focused on growing their businesses.