Review: Security Blanket For Vista PCs

The product operates with little impact on the end user. Engineers found that the client portion of the product had minimal effect on performance, while the server side of the software impacted CPU utilization by only a couple of percentage points.

In other words, the product offers effective protection without burdening servers and PCs with excessive overhead.

Testing also showed that CSM was quick to identify e-mail-borne problems and take the appropriate action, which can be defined by policies. Administrators have numerous choices to enforce how the product interacts in the user environment. E-mail, desktops and Web sites can be scanned for problems, blocked or discarded, or passed through with a notification to the end user.

CSM 3.6's biggest strength comes from how effectively it handles spam when paired with an Exchange server. The product quickly identifies it and can quarantine spam at the mail-server level before it has a chance to infect a user's mailbox.

With many antispam products, false positives (legitimate e-mails that are misidentified as spam) can be a problem. The product's integrated heuristics effectively reduce that problem. Engineers encountered no false positives during testing: Out of the few thousand test messages sent to the system, the product properly identified spam messages and legitimate messages, handling both accordingly.

Out of the box, CSM employs common policies and settings that should meet the needs of the majority of small businesses.

That ease of use may be a boon for the end user but does little for solution providers that want to build long-term revenue around consulting and security services. That low services potential, combined with Trend Micro's direct-sales presence for renewals, led to its two-star channel rating.

But for VARs looking to avoid the hassles of maintaining a security product or to do an "install and forget," CSM may be the right choice.

In short, Trend Micro's CSM 3.6 proves to be an effective product for handling many forms of malware, but solution providers are still advised to take a layered approach to security and combine it with other security products—including firewalls, VPNs, content filtering appliances and intrusion detection/prevention—to effectively close all the doors and windows to intruders and unwanted content.