Why Are Enterprises Still Paying Premium Pricing for Less Effective Endpoint AV?

Paula Musich

Summary Bullets:

• Antimalware innovators are increasingly successful in pitching their endpoint alternatives as supplemental to incumbent AV products.
• This raises the question:  why continue to pay premium prices for less effective, traditional protection?

Yet another study claimed recently that anti-virus products fail to detect 60% of the malware in the wild, according to the Security Engineering Research Team (SERT) Solutionary, a managed security services provider.  Those kind of statistics hardly raise eyebrows anymore, but large enterprises continue to pay premium prices for their endpoint protection. This is not to say that the large anti-malware providers aren’t trying to adapt to the changing threat landscape, but they are slow to innovate and are taking baby steps to move beyond the broken signature-based approach to malware protection, in which each new malware and its variant must be identified and a signature created for endpoint-based scanners to identify.