GFI LanGuard is software used to manage and maintain end-point protection across a network. It provides visibility into all the elements in the network, helping to assess where there may be potential vulnerabilities, and enables the administrator to patch them. It is a patch management and network auditing solution.
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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (formerly Microsoft Defender ATP) is a holistic, cloud delivered endpoint security solution that includes risk-based vulnerability management and assessment, attack surface reduction, behavioral based and cloud-powered next generation protection, endpoint detection and response (EDR), automatic investigation and remediation, managed hunting services, rich APIs, and unified security management.
-To track the vulnerability level of a windows network. -To push windows and other application updates from a central location. -Produce reports to highlight work being done to protect a network. In some organizations, you may have to prove for audit reasons you are enforcing policies put into place around cyber-security. This software can help you track work done on an ongoing basis for such purposes.
I think it's well suited as a drop-in EDR, really an XDR, I guess if you want to go there. A platform for most organizations. I think it lacks some of the granularity in off-the-shelf rule sets that I want for defense Industrial base or financial services clients. For heavily targeted organizations, I think it requires a lot more customization than some of the competitor products off the shelf. So if you get there, it's not there day one.
It integrates perfectly with Azure Sentinel. I mean, that's great. We can have a single pane of class with other platforms, like Defender for Cloud, Defender for endpoints, and Defender for servers, which is awesome as well. The ease of deployment is because Microsoft made sure around a year ago that every single workstation with Microsoft Windows came with Defender for Endpoints embedded.
It could be a bit of information overload which some things are shown can become noise. Maybe different levels of "security" for lack of a better term may be better where you have a summary vs detailed level when it comes to rating the vulnerability of the entire network.
I find I sometimes have issues with PCs on a different network accessed across a VPN where timeouts often occur with very large updates. This aspect can be improved.
While it's a very good product for auditing, it has a very hard time to distinguish what is malicious and is an attack, what is not. Very rarely we get indication of a real malicious attack. We got lots of hours for off the shelf malware that it cleans up automatically. So basically we never get to look at it, which is a positive thing, but threats are detected by the third party endpoint, so it will not be enough by itself.
Cost add-ons for Security features is nickel and diming the process to keep pace with cybercrime. Limited Education budgets require us to be more pro-active in finding cost-effective measures to protect our devices, staff and students. Defender is a strong, well-featured product that is pricing itself out of the education market
I only tried to access there support once and it was a relatively pain-free process. They also have a lot of documentation available online which can be used to learn and tailor the software to suit your needs. It just takes time and effort to plan, execute and monitor going forward.
The first time I tried to onboard my macOS endpoints to MDE I struggled for quite a bit. I had to reach out to Microsoft's MDE support team. The tech was very helpful in walking me through the steps during a screen share session
WSUS was the other alternative I considered but I believe GFI takes updates, reporting, and functionality to a different level for an enterprise/medium-size business environment.
I would say not to name specific company names, because I'm a partner with one of them and that's the account that I work with. But I use some competing solutions that I would say are pretty heavy from an overhead perspective with the agent that has to be installed in the machine. It can be too restrictive for permissions where it gets in the way of an employee doing their job and the ability for Defender to be secure in that, but still allow an employee to go about their day and do what they need to do is certainly a change maker there. But yeah, from the other products perspective across the years, whether it be business or personal, some other products I can name are other endpoint protections from Vera Avast, McAfee, of course as folks remember that. And some of the other major players too that I would say a large networking company that doubles in security as well. I'll name them that way.
Certainty. It allows you to know where on your network needs attention.
Peace of mind. As security professionals, we can only put the necessary things in place to prevent malicious persons from exploiting a network. The software allows you to know whether or not your risk of exploitation is high or low. and if high what to do with it.
