MetaDefender Core Linux (BYOL AMI)

Our use case is pretty wide. We wanted to scan every file uploaded by our customers to our application. For example, our customers upload ID data files to the application, and our application contacts the Core server via API and scans the files. We have about 15 external-facing applications where a customer or agent can upload a data file.

We have also integrated some of our network devices with the ICAP server for the same purposes.

And we are scanning some files on our file shares.

We sleep well now because we are assured that the files that are coming into our organization are scanned.

I like the simplicity, the way it works out of the box. It's pretty easy to run and configure. The integration of the network devices with the ICAP server was easily done.

Also, we don't have many false positives. When a file really is malicious, it is blocked. There is a really low false-positive ratio.

It just works. We don't use it for extreme use cases, and we didn't want to make extreme modifications because it works. We like that we don't need to put too much effort into operating the server. We just installed it, did a little bit of configuration and customization, and it just works.

The documentation is not well written, and I often need to talk with support.

We have been using the OPSWAT Core and ICAP servers for about two years.

I haven't experienced any instability with MetaDefender. We are running it in high availability. We have two MetaDefender Cores, each one in a different data center, and there is a load balancer. We set it up with high availability in mind. We haven't experienced any problems. The stability is a 10 out of 10.

I believe it is scalable, but I don't know how much it can be scaled. I would rate this aspect a nine out of 10 because I'm not sure. My rating is based on what I have read in the documentation.

We are planning to integrate this solution to scan files that are not only uploaded by customers, but also by third-party companies we are working with.

The support is good, really responsive. They usually respond within two hours or less, and we fix issues in about two days.

There is a guy there named Vlad. He is a great technician who has helped me many times when I had trouble with licenses or questions on how to do something differently. The support is great.

Positive

We were using ESET. It was like a homemade solution from five or 10 years ago and really hard to operate.

The implementation was straightforward. MetaDefender is quite easy to use. Installing it is very simple. The basic concepts are easy to understand.

We spent about two weeks implementing and configuring this. We wrote custom libraries with some scripts, and that's all. And it has been running for two years so far. We enabled automatic updates and it just works.

We have it deployed fully on-prem because we have sensitive data. We have it in two separate data centers. One is in Warsaw and the second is in Krakow.

There is no maintenance involved.

I deployed it with a member of my platform team and a network administrator.

We don't treat this like an investment that will return something.

We bought a three-year license, and that was pretty expensive. We agreed that it was really worth buying. It could be cheaper, but we understand that quality comes at a price.

We bought three ICAP servers and three MetaDefender cores for three years, and that cost about 600,000 PLN (about $145,000). Support is included in the price, and the support is great. We didn't need any custom modifications or deployments.

It's not that MetaDefender has some super-unique features, because we also tested some other products. But its simplicity was the main factor in our choice of OPSWAT.

I would do a proof of concept because we are talking about cybersecurity. We ran tests for free for about three months. After our testing we were happy with the results.