Microsoft has applauded the fact that its security solutions have bested rival products from McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro in terms of performance. The Redmond company has commissioned a performance benchmarking tests and metric-based process evaluations to West Coast Labs (WCL). Subsequently, WCL threw Microsoft Forefront Client Security, McAfee Active VirusScan with McAfee ePO, Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.2 and Trend Micro OfficeScan Server 7.3 in the same arena together. The conclusion was that Forefront was the best solution.

"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 favorable 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," revealed a member of Microsoft Switzerland.

It is clear that from the position of an underdog on the security market, the Redmond company needs to feed even on every step forward. In this context, going against heavyweights such as Symantec and McAfee is a move designed to illustrate the quality of Microsoft's own security solutions. When it comes down to Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.2, Forefront managed to use 60% less system resources, while delivering more than twice the speed at quick scans and over 13 times faster boot times. Forefront was also more than four times faster while performing full scans than Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.2.

"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. 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," the Microsoft Switzerland member added.