ESET is a combination of a management server and endpoint agents. Your first task is to deploy the license manager. This lets you get the licenses you'll need for the rest of the deployment. We deployed one of our virtual machines - a Windows 7 endpoint - and got it working and licensed. Next, we downloaded the management server, which came to us as an ova file. Deploying an ova in VMware is a walk in the park, so we were up and working very quickly. As soon as we had everything working properly, we started to see results on the management console.
The management server is pre-configured out of the box with 90 reports and dashboards, 30 pre-created policies and 10 notification templates. Reports and dashboards can be customized. The product also can perform software management, asset management, user notification, remote troubleshooting using the SysInspector and update management.
This product definitely is next generation, depending on machine learning augmented by human analysts to cover events in endpoints that are beyond the system to identify positively. Malwares are shipped to the cloud for sandboxing and analysis. There is a strong emphasis on zero-day exploits and malware, and much of the tool's capability is dedicated to such things as network attack protection, exploit blocking and botnet protection. There is, of course, reputation capability.
Once everything was working, we ran a simple nmap scan against our target machine. The ESET tool picked it up immediately. Next, we tried to copy a file infected with Locky ransomware from our zoo onto our test machine. We tried it three times. We never completed the paste process before ESET saw and stopped the malware. Checking back on the management console, we saw all three attempts along with the correct identification of the ransomware as Locky.
Reporting is as complete as anything we've seen. What makes it attractive, though, is its organization. You can select the report you want from the applicable group. This definitely is a threat-oriented tool. Such things as DLP and access control are not present. Rather ESET has put its effort into anti-malware, intrusion detection and protection. We were not displeased at this since the product is quite competent at what it does.
There are a lot of policies available out of the box, but if you want to edit them it is extremely easy to do. Equally easy to do is creating your own policies from scratch. Everything is drop-down so no programming skills are required. Quarantine has a restorable capability, so if the tool gets a bit aggressive - as most anti-malware tools do from time to time - you can restore the erroneously quarantined file.
The admin menus are the most comprehensive we've seen. There is not a single aspect of user, machine, policy or other management that we found missing. You can do everything - from configuration to deployment and user management - right from a single set of menus. At the top of the admin menus is a summary called "Status Overview." This, too, is quite complete, giving you a clear comprehensive picture of the status of all of the endpoints - end-user and server computers - in your enterprise.
ESET supports Windows, Mac and Linux computers and for convenience arranges them in groups. However, you can add and modify groups as well. In short, the management console is everything that the name implies - and that can be a huge time-saver for administrators.
We found the website complete and the documentation also was quite satisfactory. Support consists of no-cost eight-hours-a-day/five-days-a-week (6 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific time) support for the life of your ownership. This includes phone, chat and email support which we thought was excellent. There also is fee-based premium support available.
