Given the mountain of evidence at the inability of traditional, signature based defensive software to keep up with the geometric growth in volume and complexity of attacks, any evaluation of signature based tools strikes me somewhat as a Consumer Reports evaluation of standard definition, analog televisions. In other words, which vendor is excelling at perfecting the obsolete.
The Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms was released by Gartner on May 4. I am not saying that this report serves no purpose – I understand that organizations need to know which one of these suites offers them the best protection, even if that protection erodes by the moment. For at least the near term, you will need the defensive software such as the software covered in this research, and Gartner does an excellent job of evaluating the offerings to ensure that you get the most out of your investment.
This is also not a rant by a vendor with hurt feelings of where their dot was placed on the quadrant. Triumfant is not part of this research, as we don’t pass the basic requirements of having a personal firewall and antivirus capability in our offering. We knew that before the research was done and we do not position ourselves as an end-to-end suite and we have no issues with the research or the results. To reiterate, we have never positioned ourselves as a replacement for antivirus software, but as a complement and extension and as such we are partners with some of the vendors on the magic quadrant.
If you are a Gartner customer, you owe it to yourself to read the market overview at the beginning of the report. It notes that the ability of signature based technologies – antivirus, heuristics and HIPS – is “declining” and that Gartner clients have seen increases in infection rates in 2008 and the first parts of 2009. I will keep myself out of trouble and let you interpret these remarks for yourselves, but I think there is plenty of information between the lines.
Our CEO, John Prisco hit the nail on the head in his RSA Keynote from the Outer Aisles when he said that organizations need to look outside of the “usual suspects” for innovation. My hats are off to the vendors on this quadrant because I have spent more than a little bit of energy in my time trying to move my dot into the top right of such research. But many of these companies are the ones promising innovation rather than delivering at the moment, and customers owe it to themselves to look beyond the vendors on this report for alternative approaches to detecting and remediating malware.
When it is your data, your endpoints, your company’s reputation, the word “declining” should send a shiver down your spine. And to play out the analog television analogy, don’t look toward the usual suspects to help you “bridge the gap” that Gartner points out in the study. You may end up with a really high end VHS deck to go with that analog television.
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