Microsoft Forefront Client Security benchmark test (West Coast Lab)

Microsoft Corporation commissioned West Coast Labs (WCL) to carry out a series of performance benchmarking tests and metric-based process evaluations of the following products:

  • Microsoft Forefront Client Security
  • McAfee Active VirusScan with McAfee ePO
  • Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.2
  • Trend Micro OfficeScan™ Server 7.3

And: Microsoft Forefront Client Security is the best choice !!! ;-)

This study was conducted to test Forefront Client Security’s system performance compared to the three leading competitive products. Testing was carried out during April and May 2007. The study shows that Microsoft Forefront Client Security’s results were favourable compared to those of two of the leading competitors. It uses few system resources on servers and is comparable to the leading competitor in scanning times on both older and newer machines, and also when scanning .cab files. West Coast Labs also found that when malware was discovered, Microsoft’s bandwidth usage on clients was the lowest of all the four products.

When compared with Symantec Corporate Anti-Virus, Forefront Client Security has the following key performance indicators:

  • 60%+ less system resource usage on clients
  • 13x faster at boot time for clients
  • 2x faster at quick scans
  • 4x faster in full scans  (with comparable malware detection rates)

Forefront Client Security benchmark results

In August, AV-Test.org published the results of its recent testing of 29 products against 875,000 files, which contained various forms of malware including worms, Trojans, bots, and backdoors discovered during the last six months.  In November, AV-Test.org re-ran their test, using more than 1 million malware samples.  The following tables show the positions of the industry leaders in the tests.

         AVTest.org: Aug 2007 AVTest.org: Nov 2007

Kaspersky

98.9%

Kaspersky

97.4%

Symantec

96.8%

Symantec

96.1%

Microsoft

96.4%

Microsoft

96.1%

Sophos

94.6%

Trend Micro

95.4%

Fortinet

94.2%

AVG

95.1%

McAfee

93.7%

Sophos

95.0%

Panda

90.2%

NOD32

93.6%

Trend Micro

88.9%

Panda

93.3%

Norman

86.1%

Norman

90.8%

eTrust-VET

78.3%

McAfee

86.4%

eTrust

73.7%

 

Microsoft’s anti-virus engine used in Forefront Client Security consistently rated among the industry leaders in both tests and detected more than 96% of the malware used in this test. So, it's definitely not only about speed!

Stefan