Avira Prime, now from NortonLifeLock since the December 2020 acquisition, is an antivirus solution used to protect small businesses, a cross-platform and multi-device solution replacing Avira's legacy antivirus solutions (e.g. Avira Business, etc.) that will be phased out by December 2021.
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Salt
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Built on Python, Salt is an event-driven automation tool and framework to deploy, configure, and manage complex IT systems. Salt is used to automate common infrastructure administration tasks and ensure that all the components of infrastructure are operating in a consistent desired state.
It is good for organizations that need an AV solution that does really well in AV detection/performance tests, and also has a good track record for using little system resources on the client machine. It is less suited for organizations that want an AV product that is historically used by the industry or is known as an industry standard (e.g. Microsoft products, etc).
SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.
Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.
For the use that I currently give to my laptop it works very well, but it can fail if your way of surfing the web is careful and you dedicate yourself to visit infected forums, download files from any part, or use bad programs.
Since the product runs really well overall, and I haven't really run into any major issues, I have not had a need to contact the vendor directly for support. I have perused the vendor's site for other support channels, and they do have a number of good support options, such as submitting a request, KB articles, and Community forums. One support option that does not seem to be available (or might be really hard to find) is a direct line to call for phone support. As an individual or business member you can submit a request via a web form, which then will be sent to the tech support team, at which point they will call you.
We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.
F-Secure despite being a good antivirus when it comes to protecting home equipment does not act the same for business protection because its performance is much lower as well as its ease of use while Avira meets these requirements and its protection is much more complete and efficient, since not only acts against common threats but it is also optimal to protect against advanced threats and the one that works in real time makes the virus detection rate much more efficient before any other antivirus, that is why It is ideal for the protection of business teams
We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.
I have not had serious infections due to viruses or Trojans. In addition, every time a malicious code is downloaded, Avira detects it and blocks it fast enough. So, I have not had to re-format my PC, I have not lost documents that I had stored on disk C, and of course, I have not lost time trying to recover the data from my PC.
I've also been able to install it on not-so-powerful PCs, so its users have been able to continue using their computers without any problem and also avoid serious infections.
We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.
