SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
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Webroot Antivirus
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Webroot Security Complete (formerly under the brand name SecureAnywhere) is a suite of antivirus, multi-endpoint security and Internet security solutions available for home offices, and possibly small businesses with limited security needs.
Network Configuration Manager is well suited for backing up configurations of all your devices. It also has a great comparison tool for seeing only the differences in config. Another great feature is it's ability to push a script to any number of devices. This is very handy for pushing changes to one, 10 or multiple devices. There are also some great reports that you can run against the devices in inventory
Webroot SecureAnywhere is a good solution for those wanting to protect their endpoints from viruses and malware. It also works great for MSPS as you can manage all clients in a single portal. You have the option for DNS protection and web browser filtering as well. This would also work well in any small business.
Webroot checks all search result links and delivers warnings or approvals to users. This means Webroot is thorough and assists to keep users familiar with any potential problem sites.
Webroot is easily activated as a Chrome or browser extension to ensure ease of access.
Webroot monitors activity and will send updates to the IT department to keep them privy of any potential problems.
For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.
Webroot could do a better job of working on their integration partnerships with companies like LabTech (now known as Automate). Many times we make it through 2 or 3 levels of support before one of the parties says "oh well you need to talk to LabTech about this" or vice versa. That can be frustrating for partners when trying to understand and resolve issues between the two applications.
Cryptolocker/ransomware is a hot topic and I will say that Webroot has provided us with adequate protection when we first started using in 2014. I understand the complexities and challenges AV companies face with new threats being created everyday. I do want to point out that there have been instances where Webroot has not been able to stop one of those types of attacks. After talking with support - it was clear that they had no good answer as to why that particular threat was not stopped and quarantined.
Support for the enterprise side of Webroot can be daunting at times. Response times are hit or miss depending on the severity of the issue. Sometimes you get a great support engineer who will go above and beyond - sometimes I ask myself how this person is even employed with the lack of communication skills or actual interest in helping resolve partner issues.
Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
It's easy to renew with Webroot, their support is very attentive and highly available. However if you do choose to change products, they even provide means of removing the software from your endpoints via the admin portal which is very convenient.
The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
There is nothing perfect in this world, but Webroot Antivirus + Internet Security Complete (SecureAnywhere) is easy to use in comparison to others. Also Webroot tech support is only a phone call away. There have been several times I ran into an issue, but tech support as there to help resolve the issue.
To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
We have not had to use Webroot support much over the years. The one or two times we did we were referred to online documentation and in a somewhat condescending manner in one case and in another case, the support person did not demonstrate much knowledge of their product and referred us to the user community for support.
Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
it was a fairly easy implementation and everything was pretty straightforward. only challenge we had was getting all the snmp communities updated on the networking equipment
At the time SolarWinds was the biggest player in the space and their whole portfolio was very comprehensive. As time progressed and newer technologies came about (i.e. SDWAN) their products couldn't keep up with the consumer demands and changing market. Security became such a big focus that once Solarwinds got hacked we had to remove all their products from our environment
While we consider alternatives from time to time when putting together our budget, we haven't felt the need to thoroughly test a competitor since webroot has been working well for us and we are comfortable with the pricing.
Ease of implementation across various devices is easy and efficient regardless of scale. Whether it is 5 devices or 500 the product continually proves its the best in its class.
Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.
It has had a mostly positive impact as we have not had any breaches.
The only negative impact has been when Webroot Antivirus + Internet Security Complete (SecureAnywhere) changed something on their end that caused one of our business applications to not be usable by end-users. That cost our business a fair amount as it took 4 days before it could be used again.
