Bake-Off: Security Rivals Face Off

Grisoft AVG Internet Security
Grisoft is well known in the freeware world for its free antivirus offerings. That said, the company also offers full-featured products for a fee, something few people realize. Its AVG Internet Security product incorporates the "free" AVG antivirus product, but adds antimalware, antirootkit and antiphishing technology to make it a desktop security suite suitable for stand-alone systems.

With many security suites, complexity is a problem. After all, vendors are usually stitching together various security products to create a blanket of protection, sometimes with poor results. Grisoft avoids that dilemma by incorporating a unified management console into the product, offering a single management interface. What's more, the management interface uses a "pluggable" infrastructure that allows individual elements to be added or removed, meaning the product is infinitely customizable.

While most will find the console easy to use, the numerous choices offered can become overwhelming as users drill down into individual features and options. Although the company has gone to great lengths to protect users from the complexities of the product, greenhorns can find themselves faced with choices that make little sense to them.

The product is available either by download or on a CD at a list price of $52.95 with one year of updates, making it the least expensive of the products examined here. The AVG CD provided to Test Center engineers offered a simple auto-install, asking for the preferred language and an acceptance of the license agreement. Both custom installation and standard installation options are available. A more expansive automated installation would be a nice option for system builders, but that was not available with the product. The standard install will likely be used in most cases. Users will have to enter a license number to continue with the install. The company could help future sales and encourage evaluations by allowing an installer to leave the license number field blank and then automatically requiring a license to be entered within 30 days to keep the product active. Entering the license number proved to be tedious with 40 digits, associated dashes and easily confused characters. What's more, the license code included on the disk sleeve refused to work with the product and the company had to be contacted for another key.

Once past the hassles of licensing, the product ran a firewall setup wizard that offered three simple options: network-connected PC, stand-alone PC and traveling PC. That proved to be a straightforward approach to set up the firewall software. The wizard then scanned the installed applications to build a list of which ones could access the Internet. A reboot finalizes the installation and the product then updates to the latest version automatically via the Internet.

Although touted by the company for its low impact on system performance, engineers found the product's initial scan and operational performance to be disappointing. In testing, AVG took 14 minutes,19 seconds to scan 11,358 identified objects during a full system scan. Two unanswered questions came to mind immediately: Why did it take so long and why did the product identify significantly fewer objects than its peers? Slow performance was further demonstrated through the PassMark performance test. The system earned a performance score of 357.1 after AVG was installed and configured, down from the 370.2 pre-installation mark, the largest impact measured here. That left engineers to speculate on how the product handled multithreading. All tests were performed on a dual-core machine in a virtual PC environment with all virtual processor extensions enabled.

On the plus side, AVG has been consistently rated by independent laboratories as one of the most effective products at blocking malware, with 100 percent ratings from ICSA Labs and Virus Bulletin Labs. The program achieves those high ratings in part from its Resident Shield technology, which examines every file opened for malware. That prevents viruses from sneaking in and probably is the reason for increased overhead when compared to competitors.

Users will appreciate the included firewall and antispam protection, which both prove to be easy to implement and very effective at preventing problems. The antispam component not only blocks spam, but gives users control over how spam is blocked and accounted for and checks e-mail for any malware.

The company does offer a channel program that shows a commitment to its partners, but as with many desktop security suites, AVG Internet Security is offered direct and via retail outlets. That said, the company does offer a plethora of business solutions that lend themselves well to VARs that want to offer network solutions. System integrators do have the option of upgrading their customers from the retail products to the business solutions, making it worthwhile to bundle AVG Internet Security on new systems or better yet, systems that are occasionally network-connected.

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