Antivirus protection can be a bit like insurance: you pay for it but often don’t see what it’s doing for you. That’s because it’s quietly working away protecting you from thousands of attempts to infiltrate your IT systems.
Choosing an antivirus product can be a challenge, as new viruses are appearing all the time and vendors have to constantly update their products to maintain high levels of protection.
At the very basic level, there are free antivirus products, but these usually lack the capability to counter increasingly sophisticated attacks, are not necessarily updated promptly and rarely come with any support. Free services are often used to entice users into trying out a service so they will sign up for a paid version. Considering the value of data and IT systems to a business, it is a very high risk to trust their protection to a service simply because it is free.
Moving on to paid-for products, many people are familiar with popular antivirus programs that work on individual devices. While these can be effective for use with one or two computers, they are less suitable for businesses with larger networks. Keeping track of what versions users have, whether they have updated recently and sorting out problems on individual machines can take up a lot of IT support time. They also send a lot of data over your network as individual machines scan and update.
Centralised antivirus services can reduce this administration burden by enabling protection of all types of device your company’s network through one central console, removing the need for users to update their machines. This is especially useful when networks are distributed across different locations and also in the cloud.
Because you know all devices are up to date, you can be sure that there is no weak link that will let a virus take root in your network by exploiting an unprotected machine. A central system can also balance out the data load when scanning or updating across your network, putting less strain on your system so that it does not slow down performance for users.
While businesses might question the cost of paid solutions, certainly centralised antivirus systems will reduce the cost of administering protection and free up users to get on with doing their jobs.
Antivirus protection is just one part of security and should be implemented as part of a programme including regular back-ups and processes for managing other security threats, such as phishing. We will be pleased to chat through the options available if you would like to improve the security of your IT systems to ensure your business does not succumb to viruses or other threats.
