Worries about EOL of Endpoint protection Small Business

[Dericslab]

Are there no other users worried about Endpoint Protection Small Business Cloud's EOL?

We would need to migrate a few hundred of our customers' users over to SEP, and with 
travel restrictions and the lack of quality or affordable broadband connections for many of the users,
we are extremely worried about this migration.

(Also, the SEP interface is the old interface from ages ago, and this just feels like we are going
backwards from the "more-acceptable" GUI that the Small Business cloud edition provides)

I just attended the SED Partner Program BrightTalk webinar, and I think I am more worried than I was 
before I attended the webinar.

Would be great to know if someone else feels the same way as we do, and to discuss this and possible
solutions.


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Deric Slabberts
ICS
South Africa
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[MIXIT]

Hey there.  I have dealt extensively with the frustrations of Symantec's product positioning, their various commitments to their product quality, etc.  It's a situation where ther might be some very dedicated engineering teams doing some very great work, but all that is being overshadowed by a management team that is just not getting it.  
I have to say, I do agree with the strategy to do away with SEP Cloud, SEP SBE, and cloud-managed SEP, leaving only SES Enterprise and SES Complete.  As painful as the transition is, at least the end result should be a unified, consistent platform.  That's in theory, at least.  

I could not even begin to go into detail about all the things done wrong with SEP SBE and SEP Cloud.  I am certain I've experienced and observed every possible bit of stupidity with those two platforms.  Lazy engineering, paired with constant backend problems, which still exist even today, hence why they're chopping those products away.  It was largely in the backend platform they were using.  Supposedly the SES platform is run on the Google cloud system now - not sure of the implications but I guess it was better than their AWS setup.  

Low-bandwidth is a bad situation, I have many rural clients in my area.  You just have to be created, there's no two ways about it.  But SES has the option to create the Full Installation package, so perhaps that's the thing to go with.  It also has some bandwidth-sensitive options, but at the end of the day those SES clients will be downloading updates all the time.  Unless you have on-prem SEP Manager (SES allows this option).  I'm fuzzy on those details, I'm only just getting into deployment situations with this SES/SEP stuff, and am already dealing with stupid problems like they can't even provision my damn licensing properly.  Why they have not automated all this to execute flawlessly is beyond me.  I have have these issues with my Office 365 provisioning.  

Either way, I do feel for you big time on this, just there's little purpose in doing anything but planning for the transition, explaining that the backend of SEP SBE and SEP Cloud were on cloud platforms that weren't stable, so Symantec moved everything and consolidated product lines, and hopefully that's enough to retain most of your customers.  :\