Forefront Client Security chosen following Gartner evaluation Marine Harvest (english)

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Forefront Client Security chosen following Gartner evaluation

A Microsoft antivirus product was found to be among the best when Gartner evaluated various solutions for Marine Harvest. The world’s largest aquaculture company has changed over to Microsoft Forefront Client Security, achieving improved security while reducing costs considerably.

In the autumn of 2009 the seafood company Marine Harvest replaced Symantec and Trend products with Microsoft Forefront Client Security. As the Microsoft solution came in the top group in Gartner’s evaluation, Marine Harvest had no doubts about what should be its new, company-wide antivirus product.

“We knew that Forefront Client Security was the least expensive option. When the evaluation from Gartner confirmed its quality, it was an easy choice to make,” says Merethe Johansen, Group Manager Infrastructure and Operations for Marine Harvest.

Fragmentation a potential security risk
Marine Harvest is the world’s largest aquaculture company, with activities in Norway and a number of other countries in Europe, as well as Canada and Chile. The company is the result of multiple mergers. As a result, virus protection was fragmented, with various different solutions in place.

“The situation was far from ideal. It was difficult to maintain centralised control, it took a long time to adopt countermeasures against new threats, and the licence situation was costly and hard to oversee,” says Johansen.

Gartner given the task
As some of the solutions needed to be renewed, Marine Harvest launched a process to find a common standard for the entire group.

“Forefront Client Security was an obvious candidate, as our licence agreement meant the costs were favourable, but we had no experience with the package and wanted to evaluate its quality,” she explains.

The task was handed over to Gartner, which assessed a range of options and positioned them on its Magic Quadrant. Forefront Client Security came out in the best group.

Reduced costs
Marine Harvest has now installed Microsoft Forefront Client Security on 2,800 PCs.

“The savings in comparison with the next-cheapest alternative are about NOK 50,000 per year over a three-year period in licence costs alone,” says Johansen.

In addition to that, fewer IT resources are required to administer a common and standardised system, and the company avoids having to run the dedicated servers for third-party virus software that would have otherwise been needed.

“Forefront Client Security is so well integrated with Windows and the other Microsoft software that it can run on the same servers,” reports Johansen.

Marine Harvest now also has much better oversight of the licences.

“Previously, they were handled locally. Now we do it all centrally, making the process much simpler,” she says.

Improved security
The most important thing for Merethe Johansen, however, is that Marine Harvest now has improved its IT security.

“Forefront Client Security has a central administration console that gives us an overview of all the machines on the network,” she says. “We receive alerts if a machine doesn’t have the safety updates that it should have. It is also very easy to distribute updates and take rapid action against threats. We can access all of the machines in the group from the management console”.

Painless roll-out
“The roll-out was plug-and-play and totally painless – and it was easiest of all in Norway, where we automated the process using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager,” explains Merethe Johansen of Marine Harvest.

Marine Harvest carried out the antivirus upgrade in partnership with Ergogroup and Microsoft Norway. The active roll-out ran from September to December 2009.