Did you ever stop and ask yourself if your company has enough anti-virus protection? In today’s world, Internet whackos are creating more and more viruses to attack your PCs, your servers and your network.
They have all kinds of motives, but no matter what their purpose, getting a virus in your computer or network can be as painful as having a root canal without Novocain.
I’ve been getting more and more questions lately about anti-virus software and firewalls. At ASA Tire Systems, we sell and install firewalls at all of our customer locations and we use two kinds of anti-virus software. If you have a network in your business that includes PCs and a connection to the Internet, you should be using both gateway anti-virus and the anti-spyware that is located on your firewall, as well as local anti-virus software on each Windows PC and server on the network. The gateway/firewall anti-virus and anti-spyware protects you from attacks outside of the network, and the local anti-virus software protects from attacks that can come from inside.
You may wonder how you can get an attack from the inside. It’s easy enough – an employee may innocently load something they received from a third party via a memory stick or CD, and voila, a virus is launched!
This two-layer defense system provides you with the best protection. Many of our customers ask us for advice on which anti-virus and anti-spyware to buy for their local PCs. We provide a solution from SonicWALL that is both effective and reasonably priced. It is licensed by location and can be sold in the following increments; 1 user, 5 users, 10 users, 25 users, 50 users, 100 users, and so on. It is adminstered by firewall, so if you have 10 PCs at your host location and 5 PCs at your remote location, you would install a 10 user license and a 5 user license.
The anti-virus is from MacAfee and is enforced by the SonicWALL. This means that if a person in your network tries to go online without anti-virus on the computer, the SonicWALL will stop them before they can gain access to the outside world and spread the virus. Also, if the PC virus definitions are out-of-date, the SonicWALL will force them to get the latest virus definitions before going online. This is a really good solution from SonicWALL and is done in one-, two-, and three-year subscriptions. The most important thing when implementing this is that every PC that will go online will need it.
Make sure you check your network security to ensure it is up-to-date and that you do, in fact, have security. A little prevention can go a long way.
