Companies cutting costs and shopping for antivirus value.
Thursday, 8 October 2009
Many companies may be cutting costs elsewhere in the business, but doing so with antivirus software is not only counterproductive, it's unnecessary. Although price should definitely not be the main consideration when buying antivirus, there are plenty of good deals around at the moment.
“Price is coming more into play in the last few months,” said Declan Faller, infrastructure product manager with Microsoft Ireland.” Being secure is still non-negotiable, but if you can make savings, it's a bonus.”
Most providers agree that making savings shouldn't extend to using free AV tools, as they simply aren't up to the job in a demanding business environment.
“I would be a fan of using a brand name because they've got a track record in the market,” said Mark Donnellan, senior consultant with Business & Scientific Systems.
Foley said: “A lot of businesses, especially in a downturn, are turning to free antivirus tools. What we're hearing from our network of over 200 IT companies in Ireland is that they're constantly complaining of having to fix networks and heal virus infections because companies had been using free software.”
There is one clarification: Microsoft's Forefront security toolset is available to certain large and medium-sized companies at no cost - but the caveat is, they must be signed up to multi-year enterprise client access licences, which are typically bought by heavy Microsoft users anyway. Forefront is also available as a stand-alone product.
In any case, free tools are a false economy when there are extremely solid AV tools available at very attractive prices.
For example, CA's Antivirus 8.1 includes protection for the desktop, server, gateway, groupware and Pocket PC as well as a one year Value Maintenance agreement for a recommended retail price of €33.56 per user.
McAfee Total Protection Service is slightly more expensive but, like many vendors, it offers further discounts to customers who sign up for longer contracts. A one-year licence costs €52.79 while a two-year agreement is €79.17.
This is not a like-for-like comparison, but merely to illustrate the value that's on offer at the moment.
Businesses that switch from one AV supplier to another can avail of substantial discounts. Some providers offer savings of as much as 15 per cent to customers who change from using a rival product.
Other well-established brands to consider as part of a more rigorous evaluation would be names like Sophos, Trend Micro, Bit Defender, Webroot, F-Secure and Symantec.
Microsoft has become very active in this market more recently, and has had some impressive customer wins, including a significant contract for 5,000 AV licences with the Department of Social, Family and Community Affairs. Microsoft's presence in the security space provokes debate among some third party suppliers, who argue that it's not good security practice to protect potentially vulnerable systems with products from the same vendor.
“Microsoft's core competency is in operating systems; McAfee's is in computer security,” Fitzpatrick said.” McAfee is also looking further down the road and bundling products to handle threats outside just antivirus.” Microsoft's Declan Faller disagreed.
“One of the reasons why Microsoft security works is that from the operating system through to the management technology through to the applications that people run - and the majority of people in the Irish market would run Microsoft with bits and pieces of other technologies - is that there's very tight integration the whole way through the software stack,” he said.
The ideal way to ensure maximum protection from viruses is to take a belt and braces approach, by using products from different suppliers at various points throughout the company network.
“Best practice is definitely to go with multiple vendors,” said Donnellan, who recommended using one AV product at the firewall and another to cover the servers and desktop PCs or laptops.
This also gets around the problem where one AV supplier may have issued a fix for a particular security flaw, while another has yet to do so. Having products from more than one supplier reduces the window of attack, so the thinking goes. Microsoft has taken this a stage further by including multiple AVengines within Forefront to scan for possible infections.
“Different scanning engines take different amounts of time,” Faller said.” When running a combination of them, the window of attack is far smaller. We believe multilayered multiple scanning engines is the way to go.”
He advised that this level of virus checking should take place on the server only, as it's better suited to handling the intensive processing workload.
Running multiple AVengines simultaneously on an individual PC is not recommended and won't make your system any safer, according to Foley.
“Any antivirus that you use will embed itself deeply into your system because it has to scan everything,” he said.
“Trying to access the same thing at the same time is like getting a passenger to help you with steering the car. One good driver is better than two bad ones.”
With competitively priced products and lots of choice to suit budgets and business types, choosing an up-to-date AV package should be top of the list for any company manager. The sheer volume of malware and the potential impact of an infection means not buying is really the more expensive approach in the long run.
Thursday, 8 October 2009
