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Kaspersky And Sophos Top Security Vendor Survey

An annual InformationWeek reader survey measuring the quality of security software vendors has found Kaspersky Lab and Sophos at the top of the class. These two companies topped the list of nine antivirus/anti-malware vendors for overall performance, price, and other product-specific features such as virus and malware detection and removal. But it's worthwhile to note only six percentage points separate the top dogs from this list's last-place finisher, Trend Micro.

The survey also found the endpoint security market is still a viable one as it's "growing at a healthy clip".

"You'd have thought the market had saturated already," remarks Kurt Marko, technology columnist and author of the report. "The endpoint security market is actually growing at a fast rate. That could be because the overall threat environments are getting more sophisticated as are the security products themselves.

"Somehow these companies are generating faster growth than the underlying PC market."

The InformationWeek 2012 Antivirus and Anti-malware Vendor Evaluation Survey sought the insights of 386 IT professionals, asking them to gauge the security vendors they've evaluated in the past 12 months. Though the survey asked respondents to share their thoughts on 20 antivirus vendors, only nine received a sufficient amount of responses to warrant a full evaluation, the report read.

On the subject of mobile malware – an increasingly important threat to network security for CIOs to be aware of – the results frame an alarming portrait. Incredibly, 27 percent of the respondents stated they have no plans for mobile device protection at all and 12 percent said they didn't know if their organization had any plans in place to do so.

Marko agreed these are damning statistics and he added it suggests most IT organizations don't have a mobile strategy. Period.

"They haven't even thought about what they're going to do with respect to mobile devices in general within their organizations," he says. "The end users are way ahead of IT on this technology. The notion of mobile device security is only going to come up once organizations start thinking about that overall strategy."

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