Lastly, vendors are putting together integrated suites that start with a personal firewall, then add multiple security features into a single product to simplify desktop security management.
All three categories offer stronger protection for enterprise PCs than anti-virus solutions can alone, but savvy network architects know that every silver lining carries a dark cloud. Anti-spyware detection and removal is an immature technology dominated by start-ups. As a result, many of the products lack the tools necessary for wide-scale deployment and management. HIPSs are notoriously finicky and require careful tweaking and tuning to ensure that harmless applications are allowed to run unhindered. And integrated suites don't include all the features you might want, leaving important holes that need to be filled with other products. The result is that network architects will have to make trade-offs, balancing security, convenience, and a feasible management burden.
We'll examine these three categories in more detail to help you make sense of all the choices. We'll look at the security issues that each category addresses, discuss the pros and cons of each technology, and analyze what the major players are up to.
SPY vs. SPY
In 2004, spyware emerged as a major threat to enterprise PCs. In a recent reader poll conducted by Network Magazine, 93 percent of respondents said spyware was a serious problem, even though nearly 100 percent had anti-virus software installed. In fact, a crop of upstarts, abetted by incumbent anti-virus vendors' slow response to the spyware problem, carved out market share by protecting consumers and corporations from this new breed of intrusive software. These upstarts include Webroot Software, Tenebril, InterMute, and Lavasoft.
