Endpoint Security

My college runs Symantec Endpoint Protection for our Macs and PCs. We've used Mcafee and Sophos and Symantec is by far the best (not perfect, just best) so far. There's even a built-in process to create a MDM-deployable installation package. ("Tools -> Create remote deployment package", upload in Jamf Admin. Done.)

@macbrun Thanks for the input. We have a total of 3 Windows PCs and they are covered with Sophos. Not my fav, but we had the licenses. I tend to not be a fan of Symantec for MANY reasons over the years. I've been burnt by them handedly when I was Windows Admin. I personally use ESET on my Macs, but I don't know too much about their enterprise solutions side. Others I've looked into were Kaspersky, Sophos (on my S-List), BitDefender, F-Secure, and Malwarebytes.

Don't get symantec, go with something else, symantec doesn't have day zero releases for new operating systems & the list goes on, im not going to go on a diatribe here, look for something other than symantec though

Using ESET Business here for about 12 years or so. Have had reasonably good luck with it. We had Symantec years ago (both AV and encryption) and had many issues with it, including the aforementioned day zero releases the tut us into really tough spots.

We've got Microsoft Defender. It's pretty good and they have a Linux verson in Beta (and of course a Windows version) with Android and IOS versions in development. The only bad thing is that the pricing model for Defender is based around Microsoft 365/Windows licenses, i.e. you need an E5 license to get it and we're a Gsuite shop. Trying to see what Jamf Protect is like and how it's priced. Our ideal situation is end point tool + all other logs into a cloud based SIEM (Google's Backstory or Azure Sentinel).

I'm personally a fan of Cylance. I had success in the past with Sophos but that was not on their current generation of products. Happy to answer questions.

So we just did a bake off, of some of the top players and I had real access to their web portals and support forums. My conclusion is that right approach is best breed for each OS platform. A few big vendors their Mac client was clearing doing no more than the built in Apple security. A few vendors said they did more but key features didn't work like remediation making them worse than the Gatekeeper.

While I am not security expert I did get to "play one" for a few weeks, it was very clear to me that Jamf Protect was seeing real security threats that the other are missing.

C

PS Also it's with the changes coming to 10.16 the sensor approach is the only real choice ...