I have treated in this document about various types of tools as independent entities towards each other. However, there are some commercial integrated solutions for workstation security, which includes an antivirus, a personal firewall, VPN, encryption and IDS system. These software are all optional components that can be added or modified at will via a common central interface that let you manage this suite of software. In fact, the graphical application that manages this multi-tool solution is not very different from what we have seen here, but has the advantage of showing a common interface and tool to configure and deploy all these solutions.
Even if an integrated solution has some advantages, it also has a few inconvenients. One of these inconvenients lies in the fact that the distribution of the software packages is more complicated than it should do, and you sometimes have to launch your installation routine a few times to cover all the machines in the network. Another inconvenient is that the interface that shows the log files doesn't do anything more than simply showing the log text, and sometimes it does so in a clumsy way. It doesn't beat looking at the log files with a good text editor. But the biggest problem is probably the fact that a vulnerability present in one component can mean that this vulnerability is also present in the other components of the suite (or at least some of them), which can be exploited to shut down the integrated solution altogether. Of course, using different products from different vendors doesn't necessarily guarantee that such a thing can not happen, but a vulnerability present in one product have less chance to have an impact on the other products.
8. Costs and savings
10. Conclusion