The OPSWAT team had a lot of fun at this year's RSA Conference meeting with existing partners, learning about new technologies and enjoying great conversation. For the past few years, instead of giving away t-shirts or tchotchkes, we have decided to give a dollar to the Wounded Warrior Project for every badge scan we collect at our booth. We are happy to announce that we donated $533 to the charity this year and thank those that stopped by our booth to help us meet our donation goal!
After the conference ends each year, we like to take a look at some of the trends we noticed at our booth. This year, we noticed that a lot of people that were stopping by our booth were asking similar questions. For those that might not have made it to the event or had all of their questions answered, we have provided detailed responses to 3 of the most popular questions we received below.
1. I already have a NAC or SSL VPN Solution. Why do I need Gears?
To answer a question with a question, are you happy with that NAC or SSL VPN? If not, don't change it, just add Gears. Gears has out of the box integrations to popular NAC and SSL VPN products from Cisco, Juniper Networks, Citrix, ForeScout, F5 Networks, Dell SonicWall, Portnox and PacketFence (a cool open-source NAC) and more. It is a versatile product designed to fix shortcomings in legacy products, while also pairing nicely as the agent for next generation agentless NAC and VPN solutions. Gears addresses the most common pain points for IT administrators as well as end users by providing more accurate antivirus checking, in-depth hard disk encryption detection, and visibility to the security status of devices.
For instance, one of the most common pain points with these systems is usability. When a user has trouble connecting to their company network, they may receive a nondescript error message from the NAC solution, but might not know how to fix the issue. Gears addresses this in multiple ways: (1) Proactively by providing the most accurate and up-to-date endpoint checking in the industry; (2) By providing rich remediation instructions for the exact compliance failures, like out-of-date antivirus, or unencrypted hard disk. Save time for both yourself and your users by letting them quickly find out exactly why they can't connect and how they can remediate their device with or without assistance from the IT department.
The OPSWAT booth at RSA 2015
2. Does Gears need an agent?
One question we got a lot this year was, "Does Gears require an agent?", and the answer is yes. Agentless solutions can be categorized into two groups — those that are truly agentless, using only the network traffic to perform their functions and those that use the operating system as an agent. The second group is not usually explained very clearly, but can be inferred when the setup instructions require the admin to enter the domain username and password. Those solutions that use the operating system as an agent can come with a greater level of risk. For example, Microsoft Windows is full of vulnerabilities and exploits, so why would a company want to pay top dollar for a solution that delegates the most important functions to Microsoft? In addition, this method is incompatible with guest devices (devices not on the domain) and remote devices.
3. I'm looking for a replacement for VirusTotal. How does it compare with Metascan Online?
We had many visitors that came by the booth that were looking at our multi-scanning product, Metascan Online, as a possible replacement for VirusTotal and wanted more specifics on how our product compared. Both products have the same basic idea: provide an easy way to perform file scans and hash lookups online and get scan results from many anti-malware engines.
One of the advantages that Metascan Online has over VirusTotal is its ability to perform faster scans. We are very selective in which engines we include in the product and will remove any engine if it isn't performing up to a certain standard.
Another important difference between the two technologies is that Metascan Online offers more privacy options. We offer an on-premises antivirus multi-scanning solution as well as a premium private scanning option for people that would like a higher level of security when performing scans. We delete scanned files from the Metascan Online server as soon as the scan is completed, ensuring the privacy of uploaded files.
We were very excited about the wide range of questions we got about our products this year and liked having the opportunity to address certain challenges that companies were having. Have more questions? Contact us!
