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  • Business antivirus…. any advice please?
  • monkey_boy
    Free Member

    morning all,

    amongst other jobs i was given the company IT to look after.

    we have about 22 PC’s/laptops and currently use malwarebytes and free avg.

    i have been given the task of sorting out a ‘proper security’ set up.

    done a quick search and it is a minefield, form what i can see Trend Micro and Sophos seem to get good reviews.

    trouble is with all this new age CLOUD stuff the options are mental, from what i can see you can have locally installed AV, hardware AV where you have a box at the entry point to the network or have it cloud based and its taken out of your hands.

    can anyone suggest a product they use and whats the easiest one to use…

    ive been told they want ‘internet monitoring’ faciltiy aswell

    ps- we have no fancy firewall just the BT business hub, no email server either just pop3 via outlook 2010 and 2 file servers.

    Zulu-Eleven
    Free Member

    Purchase order for 22 Mac’s? 😀

    titusrider
    Free Member

    Our small business just runs microsoft scurity esentials (free) on the laptops, not a massivly sensitive business though

    it runs simply and easily and seems effective enough for most things

    It doesnt do internet monitoring, for that surely you will need a proper firewall?

    ps internet monitoring really annoys employees and breaks down trust in my opinion (although clearly nessescary in certain large enterprises)

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    Neil_Bolton
    Free Member

    ESET. End of.

    Rio
    Full Member

    I doubt if anyone can give you proper advice without knowing more about your business and your setup, all I can say is that AVG is free for non-commercial use so it sounds like you’re already employing dodgy practices.

    Edit: and MSE is only free if you have 10 or fewer PCs, so I doubt if that’s your answer.

    bristolbiker
    Free Member

    ESET NOD32 here – I don’t have the job of deploying or maintain it, but it does seem to just sit there in the background and quarantine stuff as it see’s fit. Not sure it’s hi-falutin’ enough to cover all/every requirement you’ve listed.

    Neil_Bolton
    Free Member

    ESET is more than capable of any corporate requirement. It’s down to the licensing as to whether you get fire-walling as well.

    The management quite requires some concentration, but once set up, it’s utterly reliable and you just leave it alone.

    Has easy ability to manage users who never call home too.

    Have deployed quite a few installations of this into different scenarios. Much cheaper than equivalent products out there.

    If I remember correctly it also employs a dual engine for scanning too.

    willard
    Full Member

    Dear gods, where to start?

    Mine field is the right term. There are a million and one (possibly more) ways to get this sort of thing set up, configured and running and every one of those ways is dependent on your technical skills, your budget for purchase and your budget for ongoing maintenance and support.

    Let’s start at the edge. Your business hub thing is a perfectly adequate little box for normal use, but you’ll need something more advanced if you want to do the whole monitoring/inspection thing with traffic. Look for F5 products, Juniper or something similar or, if you are feeling handy, have a crack at making your own system using Linux and some of the many different applications like Snort/IPTables that you can get. Either of these should allow you to limit outbound traffic and possibly monitor what people are doing. Check with legal to make sure that you are covered for that sort of thing with a suitable disclaimer though, and be prepared for people to hate you for it.

    Mail servers. The choice is endless. Exchange 2010 or similar would probably do everything you want it to, but it may be more than you need. However, you can configure it with server-based AV for incoming mail scanning, so it would take care of that part of your requirements. other products that do the same thing are available though, so cast around.

    End-point AV. We use Macafee and it works, but anything good that is updated regularly should work. Be aware that any AV product is only as good as it’s updates and it will only ever be reactive. Encouraging your userbase to _not_ open attachments from random sources, even if they look legit, will be as much again of protection. If you can set up the mail server to block attachments of specific sorts, that will help too, even if it annoys people sending in picture of cats or something in the short term.

    Cloud stuff is good, but be aware that any app you put in the cloud goes away f the cloud is gone. Always think about redundancy/failover/DR and how people will work if it all goes horribly wrong. You could even consider hosted apps on a Citrix server somewhere else in your network and really lock down the desktops, but this would mean extra hardware. Maybe even hosted desktops too.

    monkey_boy
    Free Member

    cheers all.

    it is a minefield, will look at that ESET, im not a total numpty but we have plenty working here.

    i want to keep the email pop3 as it works and wer enot big enogh ‘yet’ to warrant an in house server.

    FuzzyWuzzy
    Full Member

    The only reason to look beyond MS Essentials is if you want centralised management (beyond group policy) and decent reporting capability. I’m not sure if a small business with 22 employees really needs that but if you do I’d probably look at the Symantec Cloud offerings.
    Personally we use McAfee AV with ePO server for management & reporting and then MS Forefront TMG as a web proxy for URL filtering (it’s reporting is pretty rudimentary though). Neither is something I’d want the overhead of managing for only 22 people though…

    NJA
    Full Member

    ESET NOD32 here as well.

    Milkie
    Free Member

    Kaspersky Here. I can control all AV (scans/updates/notifications) from one PC. Also have it running on the Server.

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