Item: VIPRE
Rating: 8
Author: Phillip Barrios

Overall Satisfaction with VIPRE

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VIPRE Business Premium across our entire organization.

All servers, workstations, and laptops are protected through Vipre (even our remote folks). Currently, we use email protection and antivirus. We will soon be looking at implementing the advanced protection, as well as the patch management feature.

Our environment is 6 physical sites, in 5 states, networked via mesh-VPN between each site.

Pros and Cons

Pros

When things go well, the agent installer and auto-policy-assignment are wonderful.
Vipre has also been great at catching and removing malicious URLs from our users' emails.
The User Interface is clean and organized, which makes managing each site an easy task from the console.

Cons

I recently ran into an issue where my agents starting hopping from site to site. They were winding up in policies that weren't created or used, as well as reporting to the wrong servers. We never got to the bottom of how it happened, but correcting it took about three weeks of working with Vipre.
You cannot remove default policies. I created custom policies on purpose, and wanted to get rid of their default policies (This is where the agents kept going, in the issue I mentioned previously), but no luck.
There are lots of good features and commands that can be sent from the console to the agent, but there aren't really any options for resetting or recovering an agent that has gone loopy. To correct the issue mentioned earlier, I had to COMPLETELY remove Vipre from the clients, and then re-add them from the console. Complete removal required uninstall, reboot, delete folders left behind, delete registry keys. This worked on MOST workstations, but for the rest, I had to request the Removal Tool from Vipre.

Return on Investment

Vipre has dramatically cut down on the number of malicious URLs that our users are exposed to through email.

Alternatives Considered

avast

VIPRE is way more robust, in an enterprise setting. I would go with Avast, if I was protecting a handful of workstations but beyond that, I appreciate the centralized management.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think this is a great solution, if you're looking for centrally managed AntiVirus. You can easily and quickly gather info on which computers need attention, which ones have infections, which ones are clean, and which ones are out of date - as well as connectivity, licensing, and other status info you would want from your Antivirus.

Vipre is a fairly robust solution, so if the money's not an issue, I'd say grab it up. If you're on a budget, and this doesn't fit into it, then that's when I would suspect this to not be a good fit, as there are cheaper options out there - though you're going to be doing a little more footwork supporting each PC if/when it needs it.

Comments

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Vipre bites 'em