Windows IT Pro
Windows IT Pro's annual Editors' Best and Community Choice award programs offer a unique way to recognize the hottest products among the past year's offerings. Choosing favorites from such a competitive field—not to mention in the midst of such a financially unstable market—can be a challenge, but this year's winners show an uncommon breadth of functionality and originality.
Best Antivirus and Anti-Malware Product
Editors' Best
Gold: Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows Workstations • Kaspersky Lab • www.kaspersky.com
Silver:BitDefenderAntivirus Pro 2011 • BitDefender • www.bitdefender.com
Bronze: ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4 • ESET • www.eset.com
Why It Won: Kaspersky Anti-Virus for Windows Workstations provides centralized protection of workstations on a corporate network from malware, potentially dangerous programs, network attacks, and unwanted mail.
Mike Kavka is a network engineer who uses Kaspersky's enterprise antivirus suite. According to Mike, Kaspersky's protection is "superior to Symantec, Trend, and McAfee. Overall, it uses fewer resources most of the time." In addition, he notes that "updates to Kaspersky's database happen more frequently than most products (sometimes multiple times a day)." Although Mike did note some downsides to the product, he says that "once tweaked, Kaspersky is an excellent security suite, and the clients I have set it up for have had a huge drop in malware infections."