Sunbelt Software VIPRE Enterprise

A relative newcomer on the security scene, Sunbelt Software’s VIPRE provides a mix of anti-virus, anti-spyware and other malware protection with, according to the developer, minimal impact on processor and memory resources.

Also available standalone, we tested VIPRE Enterprise which includes centralised deployment, management and reporting tools. By preference the core Enterprise software will normally be installed on a server, but a desktop PC can be used if preferred as long as it can be left on all the time. Installation takes just a few minutes with a supporting Access format database created during the process, although SQL Server can be used on a large network if preferred.

A Windows console is also installed, which we found easy to navigate, although it was a little sluggish at times.

One of the first tasks was to deploy a VIPRE agent to each PC to be protected with a choice of methods available including push deployment using WMI or administrative shares and, on an Active Directory network, Group Policy rollout. The agent can be installed onto any desktop PC running Windows 2000 or later and servers running either Windows 2003 or 2008.

We used the built-in push tool to deploy the agent to a mix of XP and Vista machines. A wizard made it a quick and fairly painless process, the only blip being the need to turn off simple file sharing configured on some of our XP PCs before the install would work.

Once deployed, VIPRE agents are managed using centrally defined policies to tell the software when to perform scans, where and when to get updates, what to do when a threat is identified, who to inform and so on. Policies also dictate the level of protection to provide with, as well as scheduled scans, real time scanning (Active Protection) whenever a file is opened or closed plus the ability to check emails received using Outlook, Outlook Express and other Pop3/Imap clients.

On the downside there’s no integration with Exchange or other mail servers. We were also surprised to find Active Protection, email scanning and other advanced options turned off by default.

VIPRE uses a mix of pattern matching, heuristic and behaviour analysis technologies which seem to work well, identifying and blocking Eicar and other potential threats we threw at our test PCs. We were also keen to check out the performance claims especially the impact a deep scan had on the client PCs.

To this end we ran the Windows performance monitoring tool during scheduled scans. We did see the occasional burst of high CPU activity but, for the most part, usage was around the 20-30% with an average of around 100MB of extra memory required. Update activity was almost undetectable although it did take an appreciable time to deploy the threat definitions when the agent was first installed.

Anti-malware tools can be real resource hogs so this was a good result, VIPRE delivering real benefit in this regard. The Enterprise version also delivers benefits when it comes to managing protection, especially on a small business network. Agent deployment is easy, policy changes are applied straight away and you’re kept up to date on what’s happening through dashboard displays. A number of reports can also be run, either on demand or scheduled and distributed via email. Added to which you get central management of quarantined threats and a lot more besides in this very affordable anti-malware solution.

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