I recently purchased a 10 x Norton Small Business license. This was to consolidate a variety of Norton Antivirus versions accumulated over the years. I also thought the online Norton management portal, with installations via email invites, would prove useful. I also assumed the 'business' version of Norton would be a straightforward affair and provide just the core Antivirus protection we are looking for.
Today, I regret my decision. This version of Norton includes a 'Smart Firewall' feature. It was smart enough to prevent important schedule tasks running overnight, tasks which are critical to the business. Norton now has its fingers inside the perfectly adequate Windows Firewall. Because these nightly jobs access a database on our LAN, Norton decided it was a sufficient threat and consequently broke our processes.
Why is Norton Security so bloated with extraneous features? For example, Optimize Disk, File Cleanup, Password Generator. For heavens, talk about function creep!
On the face of it Norton Small Business seemed like a reasonably priced product and a good fit for our requirements. I was on the verge of recommending it to a business partner. However, it has cost us a small fortunate troubleshooting the ridiculous problems it has introduced. There is an option to disable 'Smart Fire' but Norton now screams in blood red text "YOU ARE AT RISK".
To save time and costs should we seriously consider falling back to Windows Defender in Windows 10?
We follow industry best practices and have in place centralized configuration management for Windows Firewall. We are not going to maintain an additional set of configuration management scripts for Norton Firewall as well.
My question, how can I opt-out of 'Smart Firewall' and other unwanted services without Norton complaining?
Thank you.