With progressively more consumer technology entering the enterprise, the challenge to secure and protect business information across the multitude of devices is upon us. Today's enterprise antivirus solutions are designed to handle sophisticated threats and support more endpoint devices. Here are four options to consider.

Antivirus solutions started with desktops, then servers. Centralized management and repositories followed quickly due to the demands of the developing enterprise. When virtualization came about, software vendors scrambled responding to the explosion of additional clients due to new hypervisor-based technologies. Now, with the growth of the mobile market and today's expanded enterprise, the traditional way of thinking of servers, company-owned desktops and mobile devices has changed. The enterprise is now facing the introduction of consumer devices coming into the enterprise space. In fact, over the last ten years, it is now the consumer market that is driving change in the corporate infrastructure. One only needs to look at the past successes of BlackBerry and Apple to see which types of devices companies were deploying more of. However, using consumer tech in the enterprise space does come with additional challenges, as it often does not have many of the security and management components required by the enterprise.

Both consumer and enterprise mobile devices are only one part of the challenge; with BYOD, managing and enforcing security on personally owned devices comes into question and completes the challenge. All of these concerns are brought to light as the next generation of professionals have the expectation of being able to use all of the mobile, cloud and consumer tools that they have been exposed to. The enterprise could say no, but then the organization runs the risk of losing quality talent to a rival that has little or less stringent policies for BYOD, consumer and cloud offerings, or worse yet, not properly protecting itself from a security or managerial headache. So it becomes a choice of embracing change or risking exposure, ill reputation or extinction. While enterprises are deciding on policies, security vendors have already made the decision that they need to provide the ability to secure both the data center and the consumer-influenced mobile and services space.

Vendor

Licensing

Key Features

Symantec

Client or end point licensing

Shared insight cache on a shared virtual machine

McAfee

Client and Core licensing

Single pane of glass management

Natural langue search

Un-paralleled CPU access through Intel

Kaspersky

Client and per core

Complete security suite including patch management, and reporting

Source: www.tomsitpro.com