Solution Providers Find Success With CA's Business Protection Suite
Released last year, the Business Protection Suite combines several of CA's products under one umbrella. The suite offers threat management capabilities, including antivirus and antispyware protection, as well as desktop and server management interfaces and data-protection software from the Islandia, N.Y.-based software vendor.
The suite also includes software to automate desktop migration, eliminating the need for administrators to manually enter user information.
"We are primarily a small-business provider, so it's working out very well," said Cynthia McDonald, vice president of Infassure, a solution provider in Richardson, Texas. "All of our clients were running CA BrightStor [backup software] and eTrust [antivirus and antispyware software] already, so it was an easy switchover to move them to this platform. It is excellent in that it brings them all to one dashboard—not just one product."
McDonald said the suite's ability to integrate installed CA software without requiring reinstallation makes implementation easier for Infassure's engineers. "We haven't really run into any compatibility issues, but a lot of that is because these were products that they already had been using for over a decade," she said.
Brys Consulting Group, Holbrook, N.Y., also has been installing the CA Business Protection Suite for its small-business customers.
"First of all, the fact that you're going to have integrated antivirus and antispyware in one is a big plus. Second, you will have an upper-shelf backup solution included in the price, which is similar to antivirus solutions from third parties," said Martin Brys, president of the solution provider.
"There are a lot of features that you can pick and choose, and we have installations where we install just two out of the four components. We have situations where someone might have no need for disk backup and are satisfied with the native Windows backup solution. We would just deploy antivirus and antispyware," Brys said.
He would, however, like to see antispam protection added to the suite.
Scott Pratt, president of Newbury Partners, a solution provider in Derry, N.H., that specializes in small businesses, sells the CA suites as well as similar products offered by Trend Micro and Symantec.
"We've had the best luck consistently with the CA stuff. Once we actually get it up and running—which is a very painless experience at this point—we don't worry about it," Pratt said.
The CA suite's alert functions are a selling point for Pratt.
"If a backup job was incomplete or failed, we need to know right away. [The CA Business Protection Suite has a] very powerful alerting engine, which is very beneficial for our customers who don't have IT staff and are relying on us to be proactive for them," he said.
However, Pratt said he would like to see improvements made to the product's management interface, putting it more in line with CA's eTrust product.
"It would also be nice to have their antivirus and antispyware more transparent," he said. "It would be nice if they were a little more consistent and transparently managed. Right now you're managing one or the other.
"Symantec and Trend Micro have done a good job with that," Pratt added.