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HBS-MachFlag for Solomon Islands

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Antivirus - Webroot vs Symantec?

Hi all,

Just thought id see what the community here thinks about online, cloud based AV solutions like Webroot, or onsite, signature based AV solutions like Symantec?

Couple of things to note for our environment.
We have over 5000 users trying to squeeze through at 25Mbps down/13Mbps up Satellite internet link.
Yep! that little bandwidth for that many people.
Nope! cant increase it either.
Our link is saturated almost continously during business hours (No surprises there!)
There is alot of spare capacity at night.

Webroot keeps harping on about how little bandwidth it uses, so its fine in low bandwidth environments.
But even it is only using 10Kpbs per client to talk to their cloud server, that scales out to 50Mbps for 5000 clients (or more than 3 time our uplink bandwidth)
ie) it will swamp our internet connection entirely.

Im making up these figures, as I cant get Webroot to tell me what the bandwidth needs are in reality.
So if someone has some real world details that would be GREAT!

We currently use Symantec.
It downloads HUGE updates (300+mb occasionally) but as we have a managed infrastructure, we can cope with this.
The Endpoint Manager downloads the updates overnight, when the Internet link has spare capacity.
The Endpoint Manager then distributes these updates to the clients (or via Group Update Providers to clients) across our internal networks, which can cope with pushing hundreds of Mbs on the WAN easily.

What is peoples experience with Webroot?
What is the bandwidth needed per client in reality for Webroot?
Has anyone with a similar setup to our environment used a cloud based AV, like Webroot?

Any other recommendations or thoughts?
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Pawan Kumar
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Sudeep Sharma
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Hi Sudeep,
That's reasonable regarding your comments.
But from a more objective viewpoint, there is some questions that is less "flavour of icecream" :-)

What is peoples experience with Webroot?
What is the bandwidth needed per client in reality for Webroot?
Has anyone with a similar setup to our environment used a cloud based AV, like Webroot?
>>Has anyone with a similar setup to our environment used a cloud based AV, like Webroot?
Yes, as I mentioned Sophos Cloud AV (similar to Sophos Endpoint Protection).

Sudeep
Sudeep,
Thanks.
Then what is the bandwidth needed per client for Sophos Cloud AV?
I guess no one really knows how cloud based AV solutions work in a bandwidth limited environment as i described.
I will do a trial and see.