The first is overhead. On a desktop, a Trend install is 197MB on disk; NOD32 takes 28MB. The Trend memory footprint on my SBS server (with the Messaging component) was about 330MB–large enough to cause daily alerts about allocated memory. The NOD32 memory footprint (without the Exchange component) is about 43MB, and the alerts have stopped.

The second point was the case two weeks after installating Trend CSM where it identified several email attachments as “possible” worms, then passed them directly to the client desktop. Each one, when submitted to Trend’s automated online analysis, came back immediately as a confirmed threat. Yet the “recommended action” in Trend’s ActiveAction was to pass on these threats to the desktop and leave it up to the user to decide whether they wanted to execute the worm. The failure here in my book was not so much that the worm was new to Trend, but that the default was to pass the suspicious file to the end user. Not exactly a Worry-Free (TM) approach from a system administrator’s perspective!