Symantec Client Management Suite is designed to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks for deploying, managing, patching, and securing desktops and laptops so organizations can reduce the cost and effort of managing Windows, Mac, Linux, and virtual desktop environments.
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Tanium
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Tanium, headquartered in Emeryville, provides two solution packages: Unified Endpoint Management and Unified Endpoint Security. The vendor states this approach reduces complexity, improves efficiency and closes the gaps between operations and security. Tanium can also be delivered as a service from the vendor.
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.
Tanium is well suited for organizations where enterprise infrastructure has great significance and needs to be properly managed as well as protected. Most organizations depend upon their infrastructure to sustain so Tanium can be a boon for them to sustain in this competitive market. However, Tanium is less appropriate for the traditional offices that don't have or have a less online presence.
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.
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.
One issue is its ring topology, as the data is stored in central hubs and pushed through its peer nodes. If the central hub fails, then the associated node will also result in failure.
Another problem is that all Tanium management is on premises requiring the customer to maintain it. If we want ask any help from Tanium support we always get a response like "you are maintaining it yourselves and it's your responsibility.
The Tanium User Interface could be improved a bit as, although the tool is rich in performance, a more impressive UI might really attract new customers.
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.
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
Tanium is always my first choice, so much excellent feedback online from genuine users, easy to use in any system environment, and value for money, so many good things about Tanium stacks up against all the other competitors in the market. Tanium is one of the most reliable and trusted risk and compliance management software.
