CrowdStrike offers the Falcon Endpoint Protection suite, an antivirus and endpoint protection system emphasizing threat detection, machine learning malware detection, and signature free updating. Additionally the available Falcon Spotlight module delivers vulnerability assessment with no performance impact, no additional agents, hardware, scheduled scans, firewall exceptions or admin credentials.
$6.99
per endpoint/month (for 5-250 endpoints, billed annually)
Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection is a malware, spyware, antivirus and endpoint protection application available formerly with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), which later became Microsoft Endpoint Manager. It is a legacy product, with older versions reaching end of support, and is not available as a standalone product.
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Pricing
CrowdStrike Falcon
Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection
Editions & Modules
Falcon Pro
$6.99
per endpoint/month (for 5-250 endpoints, billed annually)
Falcon Enterprise
$14.99
per endpoint/month (minimum number of endpoints applies)
Falcon Premium
$17.99
per endpoint/month (minimum number of endpoints applies)
I would highly recommend CrowdStrike Falcon to any organization serious about bolstering its cybersecurity defenses. The platform's effectiveness in threat detection, proactive mitigation, and scalability make it a valuable asset in today's ever-evolving threat landscape. Despite some learning curves and integration challenges, the return on investment and the overall security enhancement justify its strong recommendation.
It is well suited in environments that want a simple AV product/solution that, for the most part, can be easily deployed to client endpoints. It is also good for environments that want something that is easy to use by end-users, and also doesn't use a whole lot of system resources. It is less suited for environments that want an AV solution that is more robust feature-wise, or has more configurable options for the end-users. It is also less suited for those organizations that want an AV product to have the highest detection rate in the industry.
Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection offers exceptional threat protections for signature-based "known" threats.
The signatures are constantly updated and management of this application is super easy with the use of Microsoft SCCM.
The application is very much a "set it and let it" type of deployment. Once you install it, there are very little configuration or changes that need to be made.
The product could improve in the area of having better mechanisms in place with how the SCEP client is deployed/installed from the server on the management side. We have run into this firsthand with the client not installing on an endpoint, and then having to take the time to investigate why it was not installing.
A second improvement that can be made is to keep trying to improve the products detection rate for finding malware/viruses. The case can be made that there are some products out there that do a better job at this and have a higher detection rate.
Crowdstrike has a large suite of tools built for helping the engineers triage and respond to security event whenever identified. The ability to customize the security policies and implement more granular policies to different devices based on the functionality is unmatched. Crowdstrike provides so much of ability in a decent budget which ascertains the value for money or ROI.
I think it is a complete and very trustful XDR platform, with very few False Positives. It is very well supported by highly skilled professionals on all levels: from pre-sales engineers, Customer Account Managers and support engineers.
Support is generally pretty fast and gets right to the issue. We haven't had to use them much, fortunately, but the issues and questions we've had are usually answered quickly. The customer success manager/account manager you're assigned will also follow up with you on a regular cadence to ensure you're getting the most out of the subscription. There's not a whole lot of room to improve, other than the general confusion about what is/what is not covered in custom packages you're subscribed to. The initial purchase took much longer because of a package name changes and realignments of different modules into those packages.
There was a time and a place in which Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection was an excellent choice to provide threat protections. However, now that threats have been evolving, so too does the need for more advanced protections. In its current offering, it just no longer meets the needs of our organization in terms of providing protections against threats.
There is limited amount of learning that can be completed in an in-person training available. In my opinion, the self-paced learning provided by Falcon portal is more useful over in-person training. The support from Falcon is great and useful to overcome difficulties, if any.
The training provided by Crowdstrike Falcon is complete in terms of the depth of technical knowledge and teaches the users about going through with the platform. There are lots of jargons for different tools that Crowdstrike Falcon has and this training teaches them all which helps in managing the platform better. Plus, the regular knowledge checks are also very helpful for the end user.
CrowdStrike Falcon's cloud-native architecture gives it an edge in terms of scalability, ease of deployment, and real-time threat intelligence updates. The user interface of Falcon is intuitive and offers clear visibility into our organization's threat landscape. Our team felt more comfortable navigating Falcon's dashboard. CrowdStrike Falcon's API and integration capabilities meant we could easily incorporate it into our existing tech stack, enhancing our other tools. Falcon's seemed more flexible for our specific needs.
How SCEP stacks up against some of the other AV solutions/products is that it does a pretty good job overall (not the best in the industry) at detecting/removing malware, which is the main focus for a product like this. It is also easy to use on the end-user side, which can't be said for some other AV products on the market. I was not involved with the selection/purchase of the product in the organization, but I'm almost certain the organization selected this based on the tight integration with Microsoft System Center Manager, which is used in the organization. Also, given the fact that SCEP is tightly integrated and works well in organizations that utilize Microsoft products, it was probably another factor in selecting this. Lastly, the cost of licenses was probably lower (because of System Center already being in place) than other AV products.
There was little/no cost associated with this software since we are utilizing SCCM and are paying license costs for that anyways.
The level or protection is excellent for the cost of the software.
There was at least one instance in which Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection identified a crypto-malware, but not before it had already started to encrypt many of our files. So it did detect the threat, but since it was a little delayed we still were infected.
