FortiClient vs. everything else

[micahawitt]

Hi all,

Over the years I have been a pretty loyal Symantec Endpoint Protection fan, in loading a couple of home PC's for family recently, I am noticing that the forticlient seems fairly well these days over the years past.

Is anyone using this internally for a business AV solution?  If so, how big is company?  Any real issues with it?  How long have you been using it?  What trials did you go through to replace forticlient vs brand x?

Thanks in Advance.

Micah

[stuberman]

We are considering FortiClient as a replacement for TrendMicro for 8,000 users.

We are waiting for the Endpoint Management Server tool to become available before we run a pilot.

I have found that using 5.2.x for Mac causes my Macintosh to crash from time to time. 

[CfSi_Dan]

Stuart Berman wrote:

We are considering FortiClient as a replacement for TrendMicro for 8,000 users.

We are waiting for the Endpoint Management Server tool to become available before we run a pilot.

WHAAAAAAAT!  What is this Endpoint Management Server tool you speak of?

[bartman10]

Did you ever deploy FortiClient? If so how'd it go?

[micahawitt]

I did, and that was a few years ago. I have also uninstalled and actually moving away from fortinet. Been using some meraki, ubiquiti and trend micro cloud lately.

[micahawitt]

Wow, 8k users, nice.

An Endpoint Server Tool?  Very nice, did anyone send you an ETA on that?

[emnoc]

If we are talking pure endpoint security than sophos and mcfee has the best bang for the buck. If you want forticlient and all under one vendor to go along withyour security appliance, than FC is not a hard item to beat.

FWIW; As far as FC crashing macosx, I haven't seen this and we have 10.8/9/10 all running FC.

[micahawitt]

Sophos, ouch, had them when i was at GE Healthcare, what a nightmare.

McAfee, not sure they are in the game these days, I heard it has been quite silent over there.  A while back they had a few issues with virus defs blowing things out.  A little leery to switch to something that has that possibility.

Overall looking for something perhaps different than Symantec, stuck on 11 at the moment, in playing with 12 i am not liking some of the features they have thrown in there and it seems to have  a little more overhead on PC's.

Just trying to see whats all out there these days from people who actually use the stuff and are not to biased.

[emnoc]

Will not to favor over another l I actually use all three ( Sophos/FC/Mcfee)  btw.

Hands down  McFee , & Sophos maintain a bigger AV/AMP definition are are speedier on updates new risks. But edPoint protection is not the same across all of three vendor and mcfee/spohos has a suite os enterprise epp offering were FC just doesn't have this. You can't compare all 3 for example , since they do some things silmilar (AV detection ) but they offer other things that FC doesn't have  (e.g mobile encryption support , AMP and malicious detection ,etc... )

it's like trying to compare tires on Schumacher F1 card to my sister 2009 camry. They both are good at what they  are design for but  the requirements are much different. If you did a apple to apple comparisons you will see the differences.  FC compliements your fortigate UTM features imho.

A better FC comparison , would be  checkpoint EPS imho

[SteveG]

HI Micah,

We replaced Sophos with FortiClient about three years ago as our desktop AV/Endpoint Protection (2,500 PC's/Mac's/Linux). Not had any virus outbreaks yet so don't know how good FC is in a real world scenario. We use EMS to manage the clients and to begin with (we started with 1.0) it was very buggy. Now it's up to 6.0.3 and it's pretty good. The push installs on Mac is particularly good as a client reboot isn't needed. One feature we keep getting asked about is USB blocking/filtering, this was recently introduced but a very binary implementation (no white lists etc).

We couldn't use FC on the virtualised servers as it doesn't support staggered AV scanning so was causing disk IO problems on the SAN as all the scans started concurrently. Because of this we use BitDefender on the Virtualised estate and there's a push to get this on the client PC's to replace FC but that's primarily because the security team have a guy who is anti FortiClient - no idea why :(

From my perspective FortiClient is a good choice! We get false alarms and used to have CPU Spiking issue on Mac's but I like it.