I've sold a lot of Symantec Endpoint Protection and its NAC capabilities. What made the product standout, was a great administrator that could make sense of the policy capabilities. It's a very good product when configured right. Sadly 80% of installs are done by hacks that are bloody fools thinking they know it all and "it's just AV, how hard can it be?" mentality....
Now I work for a company that standardized on McAfee and ePO, and I noticed a few things I can't do like install CCleaner. It gets wiped within seconds of install. Due to it having a secure erase function. This I found by looking through the logs and registry keys of the app.
The hardest part is that no single product is good enough, and often, multiple products must be used to apply a solid endpoint management and data protection strategy (You see two disparate markets)
You've got desktop management products, AV products, disk encryption, and data management/access/protection products. No single vendor can combine them into a single product, nor would one want to! That is just a mess of complications and agents.
At the end of the day, Security Officers will say you need X/Y/Z feature, and have a list of all required features. But the reality is that, <insert regulatory requirement here> probably only needs 30% that, but it's poor comprehension, or overzealous fools that buy the kitchen sink, and only deploy the part of it.
Side note, complaining of 25Minute boot times? Where are we 1995? Seriously, get modern hardware, software, and updated applications. My guess is that you run 2 versions back on your AV software, still on XP, on a PII machine with 256MB RAM.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
