Item: Veritas Enterprise Vault
Rating: 8
Author: Ryan Hanzalik

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Symantec Enterprise for antivirus, backups and system images for disaster recovery. We use all three products listed across our global corporation for servers and Symantec Endpoint Protection for workstations.

These products address three key business problems:

1) Having the same antivirus software installed across all devices
2) Having daily and weekly backups of servers at every remote site (600+ sites)
3) Having the same product family our engineers are already familiar for our disaster recovery solution

Pros and Cons

Symantec Enterprise Endpoint Protection is a solid antivirus client. It has protected our organization from hundreds of disastrous infections
Symantec Enterprise Backup Exec has made backing up our remote sites and managing them effortless
Symantec Enterprise System Recovery has allowed us to take system images and stand them up quickly at our DR site

Symantec Endpoint Protection could have an easier to use reporting module. It is not intuitive at all to use
Symantec Backup Exec could have better pricing on extra options
Symantec Enterprise could have a better centralized management server option

Return on Investment

Implementing Symantec Enterprise has had a huge, positive impact on our business objectives by giving our business recovery options that enable us to rebuild any remote server in a couple of hours. Versus having to rebuild them from the ground up which takes 4-6 hours.
Implementing Symantec Enterprise has allowed us to have a quicker turnaround with DR tests for physical servers. Using their product has cut the DR test time in half!
Implementing Symantec Enterprise has kept our regional virus outbreaks to 0.
Viruses are quarantined instantly whenever infections are copied to one of the hundreds of File Servers in our region.

Alternatives Considered

McAfee

We acquired servers from another company through an acquisition that had McAfee installed. It was difficult to manage any of the clients connected and the management server itself had to be restarted on a daily basis. I am aware of an alternative product known as Trend Micro, but I do not have any experience in the using the product or how to manage it in a enterprise environment.

Likelihood to Renew

Symantec Enterprise is one of the best in the industry. We have already deployed their product to thousands of devices in the company and it would be a huge project to go through and change to an alternative product. We have also had much luck in dealing with their customer support. They have been very pleasant to deal with and their technical support has been quite knowledgeable in fixing our issues. This leaves us with very little reason to switch to a new product. We would have to see a significant amount of cost savings to switch to an alternative that offers all the same features and modules.

Likelihood to Recommend

Many of the server edition modules for Symantec Enterprise are the best in the industry, bar none. I would select their products every time for servers.
However, there are better workstation options out on the market.
Key questions to ask during the selection process:
1) It really comes down to price, what type of budget do you have?
2) Extra modules for any product normally cost extra, so make sure you buy the modules you need when you need them
3) Do want all your modules to exist under one platform or are you only looking at the cost and do not care about mixing & matching?

Great Product, Highly Modular, Steep Costs

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Symantec Enterprise