Symantec? Oh, my . . . some sales person was very persuasive with someone in your corporate management. I consider Symantec the next thing to Malware itself on a Windows machine. Its presence on a computer is one of the things I find that adds the most overhead.
My bad experiences with Symantec goes back many years when Norton Back Up for Mac was the pre-eminate back-up system for MacOS in the mid-nineties. They were using it at the Charity I founded for the database of clients. One afternoon a client walked up and picked up the Mac that was doing double duty as the server, saying "Hey! Cute gadget!" and hit the power switch right in the middle of operations from multiple Macs on the network. . . and truncated a hundred megabyte database to under 5MB in size. Oops!
I told the staff, not to worry. . . we would only loose current data from that day, because we had daily back-ups done with Norton. We had three sets of back-up disks, rotated daily. I got out the most recents set of back-up disks from the day before. . . and started restoration of the database. I got to disk 25 and a requestor popped up on the screen that said: "We are sorry but disk 25 is corrupted! Cancel? Continue?" No matter what you did, the Restore quit and nothing was restored. . . the file was STILL 5MB in size! So, I said, no problem, get the next back-up set. That came out of the safe and I started a Restore. . . and got to disk 8. . . and got "We are sorry but disk 8 is corrupted! Cancel? Continue?" Same result. Went to the last and final back-up set. . . and got to disk 49 and got "We are sorry but disk 49 is corrupted! . . . " ARRRGGGHHH!
I called Norton and asked them "What do you do when you run into a corrupted back-up disk? How can you skip it and finish restoring your data?" Their answer? "Uh, uh, gee, we don't know. . . the data has to be restored sequentially. We never thought about that!"
The idiots suggested using the disks from Set 1 to disk 25, substitute the rest from set 2, disk 26, and see what happens. . . so I did. . . and it said "This disk is not from the same set, Please eject it and replace it with Disk 26 from the correct set! Cancel Continue" This showed me they knew NOTHING about how their back-up system worked.
I tried editing the links but no go. . . the "corrupt" disks were literally BLANK, never formatted. . . so it was the NORTON software that screwed up in the back-up procedure. ARRGGHHH... THREE YEARS of data, gone in an instant. And the back-ups that we had been doing religiously were garbage.
I had several other companies using Norton for backup check their backups and about 10% found similar blank disks in their back-up sets!
Another time I was called into an Optometrists office to find out why his computer was working so SLOWLY . . . Reason: Symantec software was taking 95% of the processor time. FIVE different Symantec packages were arguing about priority . . . and these were NOT five differently installed packages, these were all installed as part of the anti-virus subscription. They just could not agree which order they should run, so they were all running at once with equal priority!
Another time, one of my clients had ten minutes to get a business saving bid in on time. . . and SEMANTEC decided that THEN was the ideal time to lock up the computer and download an update. . . refusing to allow anything else to be done until IT was finished 15 minutes later. HE WAS ROYALLY pissed. He wound up borrowing his next door neighbor's computer and hand entering his bid! ARRGGGHHHH!
Did I mention how much SLUDGE Symantec and Norton leave hanging around after software removal?
There’s something to be said for doing a daily backup/restore instead of just a backup.
That being said, there is some - not much - great software out there today.
Of course, most software, starting in perhaps the ‘90s, is more of a nightmare / scam than a decent product.
Because junk is so prevalent most people don’t realize how good things could be.
Symantec is a necessary evil in corporate America, as it’s the most popular “security” software and oftentimes can be found in the backup rotation as well with NBU.
And yes, our IT Security “leadership” is about as incompetent as they come. Ask the guy a question, and he’s “Uhh, umm, well... uhh... let me ask my engineers.” That’s great. Thanks.
And what I’ve found with my IT security teams is that they’re often just application monkeys with no real practical knowledge of security practices. They all buy turnkey “solutions” that need to be installed in front of or behind a firewall that sniff or manipulate traffic, and so help you God if something goes wrong with one of them.