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Symantec Is Not Up to Par
April 19, 2018

Symantec Is Not Up to Par

David Crawford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Symantec Advanced Threat Protection

My IT department used it as the primary threat control for all machines in the organization. It was meant to address a simple means of identifying viruses/malware/etc. and we would be notified of quarantines or current issues in order to inspect on our own.
  • It was easy to install on machines in an active directory environment, and maintain/update whenever we needed without having to physically go to clients.
  • The interface was pretty well locked down for clients, which was good in order to stop accidental meddling.
  • Symantec has good online resources for current threats, including messages or warning signs and what to do/where to find them on a machine in case SATP cannot deal with it on its own.
  • Doing manual scans are incredibly slow, and the UI didn't help. It's difficult to find important settings.
  • It often didn't find threats that I knew existed on a machine, and I had to use other products in order to solve the problem. It seems like it finds only the obvious threats. After a couple years, I stopped trusting it as the one-stop-shop for threat detection, and it eventually became a nuisance when given the option to favor other detection programs.
  • It didn't do well against ransomware, and in all known cases in 2015 through 2016 it failed to detect anything until it was too late.
  • Some digital assets were lost due to failures to detect various threats.
  • We had to use other products in combination in order to trust that all threats were actually detected, taking extra time. We couldn't use just SATP.
  • Ability to quickly manage/deploy via AD made maintenance of the application itself quick and easy.
Cisco FireAMP was a terrible competitor to Symantec. Outdated UI, often flagged itself as a threat, and difficult to manage/trust.
Avast was much better than Symantec, however, its deployment was more difficult. But detection was great and we could trust its results much more. Malwarebytes was the best out of all. We could trust the results, and it was easy to use and deploy. There were no issues with this application compared to Symantec.
If you need something simple to quickly deploy, it's fine. But if you have other options, go with more useful threat detection products. I wasn't impressed by what it does.