Regarding antivirus, I can only suggest - talk to someone who has worked at an MSP for a while. Companies with minimally or ad-hoc supported environments are n

Regarding antivirus, I can only suggest - talk to someone who has worked at an MSP for a while. Companies with minimally or ad-hoc supported environments are nearly always dealing with various outbreaks (I mean literally daily), and yet the one thing they are always doing for security is buying McAfee or SEP because it's the one thing an auditor from an accounting firm told them to do. Have a look at actual detection logs across several thousand machines. You'll see silly things like "tracking cookies" show up ("glad we bought that antivirus!!"), but blocked malware will be far more rare than actual outbreaks. This will leave you with the view that they are not effective. Then, talk to the sales team there. Often the only thing they can tell you about AV is that, aside from Office 365, it's the only guaranteed subscription service a client will sign up to. So now you know why having AV is a big deal. Then look at how many hours get burned on things like "slow servers", where you find your Linux PostgreSQL server is configured with its database being scanned on write. And politically, it's easier to upgrade RAM and CPU than to try and exclude the database. So now you're just totally jaded on AV wish the whole industry didn't exist. I've never seen a bad Defender update nuke a running Windows installation, which I cannot say for any popular product. Look at last week's Webroot meltdown.