In case you weren’t convinced that Microsoft has mostly given up on keeping its antivirus products competitive, the most recent results from independent lab AV-Test should hammer the point home so thoroughly you’ll be uninstalling them by the end of this sentence.
OK, maybe not that sentence. How about we go over the numbers first? We know Security Essentials has been lagging behind other options — including free ones — for some time and sadly, Microsoft’s enterprise offerings aren’t any better.
Image: AV-Test
As you can see in the table above, System Center Endpoint Protection ranks at the bottom and well, it’s not even close. The next best choice, Seqrite, is near-optimal (though it “slowed down the test client very noticeably”), while everything above that has 99 or 100 per cent detection rates.
Keep in mind the tests were conducting on a Windows 7 machine so your numbers could vary if you’re running 8 or 10. Not that your flavour of Windows is going to help SCEP detect threats better. Replacing it will, however.
[AV-Test, via NetworkWorld]