ESET, a privately owned Slovakian company with 30 years of experience in the Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) industry, holds its position as a Challenger in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection. The firm is known for its well-recognized research lab and is particularly attractive to midsize organizations across EMEA and North America.
ESET’s strong product capabilities are demonstrated by its high scores in public anti-malware and performance tests. The company was an early adopter of machine learning techniques and has made recent improvements in areas such as network brute-force attack protection for Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), FTP, and Server Message Block (SMB) protocol exploits. Additionally, ESET has enhanced its parsing and processing of scripts.
The ESET management console, available in 23 languages, scores well for operations capability, making it an ideal choice for globally distributed enterprises and those requiring regional localization. ESET also offers a deployment architecture for air-gapped systems to cater to enterprise customers with specific needs. The company has introduced MDR and implementation services, either directly in some countries or through channel partners in others.
Despite its strengths, ESET faces some challenges. It scores poorly in market understanding and innovation, having been slow to introduce innovative features such as cloud delivery, EDR, direct MDR, and XDR when compared to its competitors. While its public prevention tests yield strong results, ESET’s MITRE ATT&CK Phase 4 test results highlight the need for more technique-level detections and a larger-than-average number of configuration changes.
Finally, ESET’s product scores are further weakened by the absence of advanced EOR capabilities, vulnerability management, and configuration management for proactively hardening endpoints. These features are scheduled for introduction in the first half of 2023, offering potential for growth and improvement in ESET’s offerings in the near future.