Anti virus for small business

[jerkdiggler]

we have 12 computers in my father's company and his network admin wants to set us up with a firewall which makes sense but he wants us to pay 50 bucks a piece for each computer and server for Norton Corporate edition. Whats the difference between corporate and personal for servers? He says that personal virus programs are not compatible with servers, is this true? What about the other computers? Coulnd I just use AVG's free program. Basically, we wont be using the internet much but need an economical solution. any help appreciated.

 

[warzer]

well i must admit i would use his corporate solution. but to answer your question the server does need a special version most antivirus vendors even the free ones block instalation on servers. i ran into this when i was learning about servers and installing various workstation software on it. if u don't want a managed antivirus system like norton corp is. then you could buy a server one and just use free ones for the clients. but then you would have to control there updates and configurations manually. with corp if i remember right u can push updates and can control the clients from the server version. also you only have to d/l the updates once to the server and the server can push them to all the clients.

well hope this helps some.

Warzer

 

[amdskip]

Norton corporate on servers and avg on the workstations. I use norton corporate on all my pcs, works much better than any norton product I've ever used. Our school has a licensing agreement for students to use it on their machines.

 

[travanx]

We have norton corp. Basically you install the server part on the server. Then you can pushinstall the client onto each networked computer. Or just install the client on each computer. While installing you get the option of managed or unmanaged. Choose managed and the server controls the clients. Then I have our server setup to run a cegetter.bat which is a batch file that if you dig deep on the norton website you can find out that they do more freuqent updates not offered from liveupdate. So i have that batch running every 3 hours for new updates. And when those definitions change all the clients automatically update with the server. It works really well. And I think is very worthwhile to go with the server controlling all the clients. We used to run it where each client had to update, but as you can guess no one ever remembers to update.

BTW there are a lot of programs that wont run on windows 2000 server unless they are specifically the server edition.

 

[loup garou]

Do you have an onsite mailserver as well?
Personally, I use TrendMicro OfficeScan with my smaller clients (5-10 users), as it's a bit cheaper and works great.

The 10-user server/client version is $280, then you can pick up an additional 5-license pack (not sure about the price, but it shouldn't be too much).
If you have an exchange server, make sure you get the version that includes ScanMail for exchange for $460.00 (again, you'll need another 5-license pack).

 

[Boscoh]

I recommend Trend OfficeScan as well. Been using it in our company for 2 years. We've never had a virus get by it. I personally dont trust anything Norton (except Ghost) or McAfee, but thats just me.

 

[Southerner]

Officescan is decent, but IIRC there's another component you need if you want to run it on your fileservers.

If you're gonna be putting in a firewall anyway, go to www.sonicguard.com and look at the AV licenses you can use with a SonicWALL box. Pretty affordable, and you're protected from those new malwares that disable AV processes (no AV with current patches, means you can't get to the Internet).

Just a thought.

 

[Daniel]

The reason it is probably so expensive is that Norton Corp license are only done in blocks of 10, he's probably purchasing 20 of them to cover your 12 computers.

 

[Boscoh]

Yeah, right now you need ServerProtect to protect servers. With the new version of OfficeScan due out soon, I think they're doing away with ServerProtect and integrating it into OfficeScan. So you pick a machine you want to push the OfficeScan client to from the TrendMicro Control Manager and it detects if the PC is a server. If it is, it pushes the correct version of OfficeScan to it.

We're part of the beta testing team for the new version of OfficeScan and TMCM. They've got some incredible stuff about to come down the pipes.

 

[Fern]

I own a small accounting business. The solution I used may not help, because it depends on what you actually do in your business. After having experienced every problem known to mankind (chernobyl, etc.) I used a "throw away pc" (a celery 400 with 128mb of ram which had been decomissioned and put in storage) as a 'sandbox". It's not connected to my network, and if you need to use email, browse the web ect. You go it on that machine. If it gets a virus, who cares?, no citical company files are affected.

 

[SaigonK]

I use Mcafee Version 7.0, same version goes on the server as well as the workstation, no problems at all....

 

[LordThing]

AVG does have a network addition that also includes AVG for file servers. You could go with the 15 user license for $350.

I really like AVG. It's trojan detection is top notch. I use the free edition on all the PCs I build for family/friends.

Oh BTW, Link to the Price List (pdf) and Link to their products.

 

[LuckyTaxi]

we got this device called a virus appliance stripper from Ositis. Very cool device.