Your choice of anti-malware software for your organization is too important a decision to be based solely on your experience with a given vendor, customer testimonials (they’ll only share the good ones with you anyway), product reviews, or industry testing reports.
The recently released book Next-Generation Anti-Malware Testing for Dummies is designed to enlighten you regarding the virtues of testing anti-malware products for yourself in your own environment.
Let’s start by pointing out that there are some reputable testing houses out there. In these cases, you can find examples of positivity and growth, usually coupled with the willingness to change and work with new security technologies.
However, there are also plenty of testing houses that are unduly motivated or influenced by factors that can negatively affect the objectivity of their testing.
“It’s a huge challenge for testers to innovate and push the boundaries when the vendors funding these tests want to maintain the status quo,” noted Carl Gottlieb of TestMyAV.com.
You shouldn’t dismiss public test results outright, but they should be taken with a grain of salt. Don’t blindly accept public test results or arbitrarily dismiss a product that isn’t recommended by one of the testing houses.
It’s possible — even likely — that the vendor simply didn’t “pay to play.”
Instead, you should select your anti-malware protection as you would any other technology. Talk with different vendors, peers, and customer organizations, but most importantly, evaluate your options for yourself. Do a “proof of concept” for anti-malware protection by testing the different products for yourself under a variety of real-world conditions.
“Every environment is different and we all have contrasting views on what our definition of real-world looks like,” Gottlieb continues. “We have to align testing with our own situation if we wish to produce meaningful results.”
While the publication is intended for IT managers and security administrators tasked with server and endpoint security in your organization, it is crafted to be accessible to non-technical readers as well, so you’ll come away with more knowledge about malware and anti-malware solutions testing.
This resource is offered at no charge, and contains a wealth of information that will get your team up to speed in order to set up your own internal testing lab so you can better evaluate which anti-malware solution Is the best for your organization.
Download Next-Generation Anti-Malware Testing for Dummies, and feel free to reach out to our team of experts for more information on why testing for yourself is the key to furthering your endpoint security efforts.
