Symantec Client Management Suite vs. Trellix ePolicy Orchestrator

Whenever you have computers that aren't easily accessible or you have a big site to cover (or multi location), Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is really great to manage all your computers, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Setting up all you need from CMS can take some time, especially when you're in a multi-location site. We had to ask the Symantec engineers to help us a couple of times and set things up because even if we followed the documentation, it wasn't an easy task. But at least, the Symantec engineers are people that know what they do and they're really efficient at it.

Incentivized

[McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator] seems to be better suited to large enterprise applications... I don't feel it really suits the or self-managed SMB market. The general joe is not going to understand how to wield this product to it's full potential. For those of us managing large networks, this is a very ideal product for managing multiple sites and users.

Incentivized

• Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
• Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
• Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.

• Static malware scans for known bad processes and files works well and can be schedules on endpoints easily
• Preventing users from accessing USB drives and other peripherals is easily configured. We can also allow users to access to USB drives with user codes for the times they need it for business reasons.
• ePO provides access into our MSME software so that we're not managing many different products from different locations.
• In recent years the console has gotten much easier to navigate even though there is a ton of information to be accessed.

Incentivized

• More transparency with the roadmap would be a welcome change. New and upcoming features are usually a surprise until a major Symantec Event takes place but little is heard about those features before and even after, in some cases, leading up to a release.
• Documentation for some items is poor. Especially around the Workflow product. It was intended that the documentation for the elements in a workflow would be crowd-sourced, which is a good idea, but in order for that to happen, more people need to be using it and taking the time to draw up the documents.
• Cost. Its always a big topic, especially in higher-ed, but Symantec could do more to lower its costs for some product lines in order to gain more acceptance and support. If that was done and more institutions could get their student workers to use the product, once they leave college and go into the "real-world" there is a possibility that they would start recommending Symantec products because of their use in College.

Incentivized

• It has a slow mechanism when adding custom threat feeds. For example, if McAfee didn't have a signature or detection about a new virus and we try to add it to our console it is like a really big process in adding that to our available signatures.
• Whenever a scan is performed, the system CPU utilization goes up 100 percent.
• Installation fails due to difference in timestamp when we try to shuffle between packages.

So far so good - no major issues with that technology.

Incentivized

Because the company is evaluating other products.

Incentivized

User friendly, what is the only point to be improved is about the inheritance of policies and tasks.

Incentivized

Outage only during upgrade... but not impact the environment.

Incentivized

No issues

Incentivized

Support at Symantec isn't that great. Client Management Suite isn't even listed on the Support Portal when trying to open a ticket. Your best bet for support is actually the user groups that Symantec hosts. The members of the groups are usually very responsive. With Broadcom buying Symantec, I've seen a huge jump in personnel leaving Symantec, so I'm assuming the support is just going to get worse. Recently for a simple question, I reached out to 5 people just to find out 4 of the 5 had left the company.

Incentivized

McAfee support is definitely GREAT! It is one of the best technical support on a business level. GOLD support is recommended to business. Their website is easy and quick to create a ticket. Their technical team usually responds right away with an email or call. Via call and web they provide a full and complete support until the issue is resolved. The best, most of the time they explain in detail what is the issue, the reason and how to resolve it.

Incentivized

Although there are other tools that can be utilized I don't believe those tools are as robust as Symantec Management Platform. The Symantec Management Platform was chosen because of the value it returns internally and for our customers. You can pull just about any data element from an endpoint and provide detailed reports or great graphs for the C-Level

Incentivized

I have used Symantec Endpoint Encryption before. Symantec and EPO are both good in their own ways. EPO allows integration of other McAfee products. I have been using ePolicy Orchestrator for years. I have a lot of experience with the product. That is why I like it.

Incentivized

The time of renewal

Incentivized

Trellix ePolicy Orchestrator is a great tool, and provide complete security with Endpoint Suite.

Incentivized

• SMP allows us to centrally manage all of our endpoints with little to no end user interaction.
• With the new P2P downloading our bandwidth constraints have been almost completely removed.
• Cloud Enabled Management (CEM) allows our remote users to receive the same updates as in-network devices without the need for a VPN connection.

Incentivized

• Peace of mind that your environment is safe and secure.
• Keep your network environment up and running.
• Additional resources (consulting or training) may be required if not familiar with the product.
• Very complex to setup and configure ( training may be required).
• Once configured, it will take care of almost 80% of your tasks.

Incentivized