Kaspersky Alternates

[Dave Rice]

Yes I suppose fiddling with DNS would do it. It would be a bold move and they’d have to convince the public the dangers of having an out of date AV was justified or that there was a real chance that Putin would weaponize it. Probably the latter would play better with the popular media journalist types, no need for anything technical just some jingoism.

Not one customer or family member has asked me about Kaspersky yet and whilst I have a strategy in place I’m going to keep it to myself unless they do. I suspect the question will come at renewal time, but most have renewed for 3 years at a time.

The charity’s Bitdefender is up for renewal in May and whilst there is still a good £ deal on the table I’m actively trying to reduce the complexity of their IT. The elderly Synology NAS and Office on the PCs have been replaced by Google Workspace and I also don’t need to manage profiles on the PCs any more. My calls have dropped dramatically.

So I’m moving them to Norton for Small Business, which I’ve used elsewhere for customers with more seats, and with 25% discount it’s good value too. It’s easy to deploy centrally via an email invitation, real KISS stuff, and the default set up is perfectly acceptable whilst sill allowing fine control if needed. It lacks the reporting of Gravityzone, but that’s such a handful – for instance the default policy will block ALL Wi-Fi, I really won’t miss it. The real killer USP though is a 24 / 7 helpdesk for all employees, not just the techy or the boss.

The question now is whether to think about a Chromebox when a PC or laptop dies, or go to Chrome OS Flex right now. My T400 isn’t doing much these days, may be time for a play.

[Dave Rice]

Due to wholesale changes at Charity Digital, the only AV I could get my hands on and get the work done this weekend was Avast Business Cloudcare. At an 86% discount the price was right and I didn’t have to buy licenses in blocks of 5 or 10 with a minimum or maximum. I later found out that’s because Charity Digital are a Partner of Avast and run the system.

It’s managed very much like Bitdefender in that there are policies and groups available, but it much more SMB friendly and the default policy is not uber lock downed in nature. About the only thing I tweaked was to specify their office network so that it’s trusted (Microsoft so of ten default to Public these days) and set a sensible delay after boot time to look for updates (far too much kicks off at once).

A sensible range of alerts has been set up on the Dashboard, which can be emailed as well, as can an extensive range of reports. It’s easy to get to grips with.

Other services can be added, such as Patch Management and Content Filtering, but at extra cost. However what is included is a Remote Desktop service that works very well indeed. Connections are initiated via the console in an on demand basis with an associated exe file for the session, so there are nothing left open locally once a session is finished.

It has it’s foibles of course, but this is a good alternative for those who want more control than the likes of Norton Lifelock without the complexity of BitDefender. I am impressed, but the real test comes next week when the users are back at their desks!

It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a nagger, but there is an option for a silent mode which is something Lifelock could do with.

[Ed P]

Looks like the UK Government have provided a legal framework for censorship of sites put up by ‘banned individuals’. If they wanted to Kaspersky could be placed on this list.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/04/russia-sanctions-add-shock-internet-censorship-twist-for-uk-isps.html

[Dave Rice]

Usual Government crap, they are never across the detail.

Deliberately putting at risk millions of households and businesses seems totally reckless.

[Dave Rice]

Just resetting my old laptop for NDIL to use. I’m going to give Avast One Free a whirl as they do a 30 device Family bundle for £110 (£55 intro offer) in case I need an alternative quickly.

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