New offerings include a separate cloud sandbox solution and an endpoint detection and response product, the latter being a first for ESET. ESET Remote Administrator is also being replaced with a new enterprise grade management tool.

Security software vendor ESET has established a strong base in the SMB sector for the commercial side of its solution offerings. They have always had some enterprise customers, and some solutions aimed at that market. Now, however, they are intensifying their enterprise focus significantly with a series of new offerings. The new ones are ESET Enterprise Inspector, an Endpoint Detection and Response [EDR] solution, and ESET Dynamic Threat Defense, an off-premises cloud sandboxing tool. ESET Security Management Center is also new, a replacement for ESET Remote Administrator designed to support the new enterprise offerings as well as the existing solution set. Some new enterprise services were announced as well.

“With this release, ESET is looking to satisfy the ‘can’t sleep at night’ enterprise buyer, who always want more to protect their business, so they aren’t the next big news story by being breached,” said Ben Reed, Product Marketing Manager at ESET North America.

“These products will empower our partners to have conversations with enterprise customers,” said Jim Chalmers, director of partner sales and alliances at ESET Canada. “Over 90 per cent of the market in Canada is SMB, and we have focused mainly on that, but we will now be able to address the enterprise with confidence. We have a large group of very loyal partners in Canada – close to 1000. They have told us that customers love us, but that they have been asking for solutions for larger environments, and these solutions address that.”

ESET Security Management Center, the replacement for the ESET Remote Administrator, is technically superior to its predecessor, but its presence is equally important as a message to enterprise buyers that ESET is fully enterprise-grade.

“The biggest thing we have seen in the enterprise market is that the enterprise wants to feel as though a product is specifically tailored for them,” Reed said. “Our products have always been enterprise grade. However, our notifications and reporting around the product weren’t that robust, so the enterprise didn’t think it was ‘enterprise enough’ for them.”

The new management tool is a fully enterprise grade server that will give the enterprise buyers the visibility, management and reporting capabilities that they want, and which has also been designed to handle the new offerings.

“ESET Remote Administrator would only manage normal endpoint security products, but ESET Security Management Center now manages all ESET security products,” Reed said. “It was created to manage the new products. There’s also new functionality. Things are set up easier so everything can be done from a single click. We built a whole new automation engine for this, to allow things to be done in one click, and also be set up to be automatically done. The reporting and notifications are all revamped to be much more robust as well.”

ESET Enterprise Inspector adds an endpoint and response solution that ESET did not have at all before.

“This category of product is fairly new, and gives enterprises more visibility and tools to protect against Advanced Persistent Threats,” Reed said. “Enterprise Inspector gives them the ability to hunt and find threats that have gotten inside, and respond to them.”

Reed said that this has been generally something that has been limited to the enterprise market because it does require an IT person to monitor it, but that ESET has also made Enterprise Inspector as user-friendly as they can for smaller companies.

“Traditionally SMBs don’t have as large an IT staff, and just don’t have the time or resources to manage something like this,” he said “We tried to make it as inviting as possible for them with many automatic alerts around weird activities, like behaviour typically associated with ransomware. However, while we have tried to make it as inviting as we can more companies with smaller IT staffs, because it does remediation, it will require a human. We think that will limit its applicability in the SMB to certain verticals, but we do think that those ones will find this useful.”

Enterprise Inspector is sold separately from other solutions, either bundled with them or as a standalone.

ESET Dynamic Threat Defense is another brand-new enterprise solution, that provides off-premise cloud sandboxing, using leverage machine learning and behaviour-based detection to defend against zero-day attacks.

“All ESET products have had an in-product sandbox, but these have limitations, compared to the off-prem,” Reed said.  “You are basically limited to the resources of the computer you are on, so you can’t do more interesting things. This new cloud sandbox has the ability to take a file, put it in the cloud and run it with no limits on memory, to get a response in five minutes maximum. It can be a lot less than that – depending on how long we need to let it run. Most sandboxes can take about an hour to get the same level of result.”

Reed said that this feature resonates strongly with customers.

“Where we see the most use for this is connected to an email server, because much ransomware comes from email, and customers really want to be sure that ransomware doesn’t make it through,” he indicated. “Lots of prospects want this extra layer of defense against malicious emails. It’s an extra preventative step.”

“We think that this is the kind of product that will lead directly to sales for our resellers,” Chalmers added. Like  ESET Enterprise Inspector, it is sold as a separate product.

ESET has also introduced two new services that customers have been asking for: ESET Threat Monitoring; and ESET Threat Hunting.

“These services are to meet enterprise demand,” Reed said. “When combined with Enterprise  Inspector, they provide additional resources to help.”

A third service, ESET Threat Intelligence, existed previously, but is being re-announced now because of its consistency with the new services as part of a total package.

“The Threat Intelligence is the same product as before, but with all of these other enterprise solutions, it makes more sense to reannounce it,” Reed said. “It has always been targeted at the enterprise, but before, we used it as an entryway to enterprise customers. Now, within the context of all these other architectures, it is much more of a complementary piece.”

ESET is demoing its new enterprise offerings at RSA 2018, booth 1401 (South Expo).