TYPES OF REPORTS

Analyst Briefs

The analyst team provided additional context to test reports along with standalone briefs including company profiles, market analysis, and product snapshots.

Test Methodologies

Complimentary briefings were held with enterprises, industry analysts, and product suppliers to receive valuable feedback that ultimately became the foundation of NSS Labs’ test methodologies.

Test Reports

The NSS Labs testing programs combined proprietary, commercial, and open-source tools to perform deep dives into a security product’s capabilities and limitations. The reports showed measurements for security effectiveness, performance, stability, usability, and cost of ownership.

Test Reports for a specific technology product contained granular details on security effectiveness, performance, and stability not available in the Comparative Reports.

Comparative Reports in a technology category provided detailed comparisons across all tested products for security, performance, and total cost of ownership.

Security Value Maps™ (SVM) were unique to NSS Labs and mapped Security Effectiveness and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) per Protected Mbps (Value) of test product configurations. This graphical representation of the empirical data taken from individual Test Rest Reports and Comparative Reports resulted in overall product ratings of Recommended, Neutral or Caution.

Product Rating Reports were a forecast, an expert opinion about a product’s capacity to meet its obligations to consumers over time. It includes a detailed analysis and expert opinion of management, false positives, resistance to evasion, and attack prevention/detection. Ratings ranged from AAA – D.

Comparative Ratings Reports quickly summarized findings of Product Ratings Reports: they efficiently conveyed NSS Labs expert opinions on the differentiation between various vendor offerings and helped consumers identify which products may meet their needs.