By Barry Nance, Network Testing Labs
Malware can cost your company the time, effort
and expense of extricating its residue from infected
computers. A study by The Radicati Group, entitled
“Corporate Anti-Spyware Market, 2005-2009,”
indicates that the number of anti-spyware tool
licenses will increase from 16 million in 2005, to over
540 million in 2009. Companies are concerned about
spyware’s security risks, regulatory compliance and
employee productivity losses. The study also reveals
that the administrative cost of dealing with spywareinfected
computers will quickly rise as spyware
programs become increasingly devious, reaching
about $265 per user in 2005.
To find out which anti-spyware product is best, we
tested IronPort Systems’ S-Series appliance and
Bluecoat’s SG-8000 appliance. The most important
criteria in our evaluation was the ability to identify
and thwart all (or virtually all) spyware. We also
looked for useful reports, timely alerts, ease of use
and ease of deployment. Protecting our network
from users who roam the Internet too freely was
our goal. |
Smart Gateways
Stopping spyware via gateways at each Internet
connection point is clearly superior to cleaning it off
individual servers and desktop computers. A gateway
is simpler to administer, users can’t fool with it, and
desktop machines and servers don’t have to shoulder
the extra burden of detecting and removing spyware.
To the extent that a gateway filters every single
crumb of spyware, and users do not bring freeware
or shareware software into the office, the gateway
approach is an ideal anti-spyware solution.
In our review, we discovered which product is the
best anti-spyware gateway. We scored the antispyware
solutions using six categories, giving each
category the weight shown in parentheses:
• Malware identification/blocking (40%)
• Additional features—stopping “phone home,”
definition update frequency (15%)
• Performance (15%)
• Reports and SNMP alerts (10%)
• Ease of use and deployment (10%)
• Documentation (10%)
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