SQL Server Magazine

The Installation tab of the Properties panel is the place to go to deploy products to discovered hosts, import autoregistered hosts into the domain tree, and review the versions of available software installation packages. I tested software deployment by pushing Client Security 7 to a Win2K Professional workstation. The deployment was smooth, with no surprises.

Anti-Virus Mode
Anti-Virus Mode, which the F-Secure Client Security Administrators Guide describes in detail, is an interface designed to work with the Client Security 7 application. Some of the functions overlap with Advanced Mode functions, including policy settings relating to client scanning and the client management agent. Overall, this mode is well designed. The Summary tab provides useful, actionable information, such as the number of new autodiscovered hosts and the number of alerts issued for problems encountered. The Outbreak tab provides threat-related news that's automatically downloaded from F-Secure along with regularly scheduled detection and software updates. The Operations tab lets you apply new updates to clients on demand and start manual virus scans on clients within a selected portion of the domain tree.

Reporting is easy and flexible. Eight report types are provided, and you can filter the output by product and limit it to a selected policy domain or set it to include subdomains. Reports are generated in simple HTML format, which you can save using the standard browser-based function.

Final Analysis
I found Policy Manager Console to be particularly easy to work with. Because the console manages one server at a time, the largest organizations with multiple Policy Manager servers won’t see a full organizational view. For organizations where multiple Policy Manager servers aren't deployed, F-Secure’s Anti-Virus Enterprise Suite with Policy Manager provides a workable solution.

Kaspersky Lab Open Space Security
Kaspersky Lab has announced a major update of its enterprise antivirus and centralized management products under the new product umbrella of Kaspersky Open Space Security. The updated products include Administration Kit 6.0, Antivirus 6.0 for Workstations, and Antivirus 6.0 for Servers. Kaspersky Mobile Security, for Windows and Symbian OS–based mobile phones, rounds out the suite. I reviewed a “technical” release, a feature-complete late beta version, a few weeks prior to the RTM.

Architecture
Kaspersky's Administration Kit 6.0 is the server-based centralized management component of the Open Space Security suite. Installed on a single server or a hierarchy of servers in larger organizations, Administration Kit makes use of a SQL Server or MySQL database to track the status of managed systems. The administrative server also serves as a central distribution point for product updates, including antivirus and malware detection rules. Because Kaspersky publishes newly developed pattern files hourly, administrative servers check for and download them hourly. An agent service runs on managed systems and reports scanning activity and detected threats to the administrative server. The administrative server polls each of its clients every 15 minutes to determine status and health; clients poll their administrative server hourly, checking for updates.

Installation
I started by installing Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) 2000 SP3, as instructed by the Administration Kit Deployment Guide. Installing Administration Kit was next. The install generated a security certificate to secure administrative data and created a password-protected backup of the certificate to be used when necessary to restore an administrative server installation. Kaspersky Lab supplies a utility to back up and restore this data. The server itself will be protected according to the antivirus application policies of the group you assign the server to.

Using the Console
Standard Windows users—that is, Windows local machine and domain accounts—are used to authenticate access to the administration console. Within the console, you can grant administrators access to individual administrative servers or to the group within the console tree structure that holds administrative servers.

The Administration Kit is designed to manage all Kaspersky Lab applications. You use a wizard to create installation packages complete with the information needed to connect to a particular administrative server. Anti-Virus 6.0 for Workstations is remotely deployable. I tested the remote deployment and found few surprises. After you create installation packages, you can use the wizard to assign computer names to them and schedule them for execution. You can reuse the packages by rescheduling them with new systems.

The Quick Start Wizard made easy work of initial implementation tasks, including creating default alert notification settings, a default Anti-Virus 6.0 for Workstations policy, a scanning task, and a software and detection rules update task. The wizard downloaded current updates.

As Figure 2 shows, the administration console has a familiar layout. On the left, you’ll find a hierarchy of administration servers, although in Figure 2 only one server, localhost, is shown. Below the server you find objects and tasks such as Groups, Updates, Remote install, Reports, and Events. Clicking any object or task will display associated objects and tasks. Clicking Remote install, for example, displays remote installation–related tasks for creating an installation package, installing a package, or uninstalling a package, along with a list of installation packages you have created.

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