We are often asked: What’s wrong with using one of the free anti-virus products, such as AVG or Avast? Why do you want to sell us an AV product that costs money?

Well, let us start by making it clear that we make no money from anti-virus products. Because they are freely available from the vendors at a set retail price, we can only make whatever margins our reseller status permits. And in the case of AV products, this is so low that we spend more in fulfilling the order than we make in margin. We could simply offer the product that gives us the largest margin, but that would violate our ethics, and also fail to change the financial picture in any worthwhile way.

It is in our best interests by far to offer the product that delivers the greatest protection at the least impact to our clients – that is, the product that delivers the highest client satisfaction. If it is also amongst the least expensive of options, so much the better.

When it comes to malware, we recommend and internally use one product: Kaspersky Anti-Virus. Comparative shoot-outs consistently show this product to offer the very best protection with low burden to the computers on which it runs. It is also amongst the least expensive, at less than half the price of most other products (such as Symantec, Norton and McAfee AV offerings). It also has a good set of corporate tools, enabling centralised deployment, management and updating of the product and its virus signatures.

So what of the free products? Most of the vendors offering free products also offer paid versions. Why? These vendors will claim that their paid products offer features and protection more advanced than their free versions, but without necessarily specifying what these advances are. It appears to us that in some cases, the free versions are little more than a means to harvest new virus signatures in the wild. It makes their customers part of their virus research capacity, rather than focusing on protection as the highest priority.

In September, Microsoft made its entry into the free AV market, with Microsoft Security Essentials. Our experience and industry benchmarks suggest this product offers a good level protection with acceptable system impact. However it is limited to ten PCs in the free version, and so is not a good solution for most of our clients. We also have some other concerns. Microsoft have made no undertaking about how long the product will remain free, and on what terms. Many analysts see this as a grab for market share, followed by the usual monetization process. Further, with other anti-malware products in the past, Microsoft has shown a propensity to admit malware from friendly companies, while being unduly aggressive about malware from its competitors. This history gives us little comfort.

That said, if you are looking for a free anti-virus product for home use, and don’t mind switching if needed in future, Security Essentials is worth a look.

For corporate use, we continue to use and recommend Kaspersky. To reinforce this point it is worth recognising that, as a reseller, we have full access to virtually any AV product for free. However, we use Kaspersky ourselves, and expect to do so for a long time to come.

As a member of SMBiT Professionals, we are also aware of what the 400 or so member companies use and recommend. Probably the most popular is Trend Micro, due primarily to their excellent reseller channel support. Kaspersky comes in at number two, and NOD32 (from eSet) is third.

Trend Micro is a good product, and we use some of that company’s more advanced tools (such as HiJackThis) when we have to deal with particularly nasty virus infections, however it does not top AV shoot-outs nearly as often as Kaspersky, and it seems to suffer from an unusually high number of breakdowns (often caused by bad updates). Hence our continuing adherence to Kaspersky.