Reply by Anderson from iQuest Consulting Pty Ltd on Wednesday, 10 September, 2014 - 16:40

All anti-virus products do pretty much the same thing. From technology aspect, our concern is the resource footprint. ie. does it take up too much of your server or desktops resources and slow things down. For the company aspect, user education is important as you dont want users to be reckless (clicks on everything) and compromise the system. Anyway, We recommend Hosted trend micro or Symantec to our clients. Our clients make sure their employees signed an IT usage policy. Hope this helps! Ando

Reply by Grant Laing from Blended IT Solutions on Wednesday, 10 September, 2014 - 21:54

Hi Narda, As mentioned below, all anti-virus pretty much do the same thing, eset is a good product but can be fiddly to remote manage. The symantec and kapersky products are both good options for your size, and will do most of the stuff automatically, once setup. A lot of the recommendations on anti-virus come down to personal preference of the IT guys supporting it. But if these products fit your budget, then these will do the job just as well as eset will. (Bitdefender will work but previous versions were computer resource hungry) Hope this helps Grant

Reply by David Sia from Techware on Wednesday, 10 September, 2014 - 22:47

Hi Narda, te antivirus software from Connecting Up will be suitable. Be careful with the workstations, if your PC is old, the antivirus software can slow the PC down further.

Reply by Colin Thompson from TechBrain on Friday, 12 September, 2014 - 14:15

Hi Narda, Once again I would suggest that Symantec Protection Suite is on ConnectingUp and is a rock solid product. It will protect your devices, servers and email/exchange. http://mig1.cisa.asn.au/donations/symantec-enterprise/symantec-protection-suite-small-business-edition? Default install is relatively simple but it is a very good product. You can centrally manage all clients/servers/devices including controlling signature updates exclusions etc. A great product. Regards Colin Thompson Community @bluenetworks.com.au http://www.bluenetworks.com.au

Reply by Colin Thompson from TechBrain on Friday, 12 September, 2014 - 14:20

BTW Narda. If they are pointing you away from ConnectingUp for AV, what else are they not telling you about because they are not able to make any money out of it. I would recommend you find someone in your state who is happy to give advice and assist you in the spirit of ConnectingUp.....which is about helping NFP's....not ripping them off. Find a supplier on this site who provides some comments and assistance in your state and does not regularly offer their own services or products at the drop of a hat (Because there are plenty of those here) and ask them for some help with your IT. They probably won't do it for nothing but at least if they are genuine about helping NFP's you are on better ground than your current arrangements..... Regards Colin Thompson community @bluenetworks.com.au http://www.bluenetworks.com.au

Reply by Troy Cowin from Perth Systems Pty Ltd on Friday, 12 September, 2014 - 15:28

Antivirus products are a bit like politics. A necessary evil, and each person has their own opinion on which one is best. To add my 2c to this topic, we generally use Trend Micro Worry Free Business Security on most of our client sites. We have found it to be one of the better products on the market. We have had a number of issues with Symantec products over the years, and thus no longer use them. Whilst connecting up is a fantastic resource for getting great products at incredibly cheap prices, it's worth mentioning other vendors also offer discounts for NFP organizations - including Trend Micro. Also worth mentioning that your IT contractors are the ones that will need to install, configure and manage your antivirus system on a day to day basis. So just because you can get a cheap license here, it may end up taking longer to be installed and configured, thus costing you more in the long run. It's worth discussing in more detail with your IT consultants, and compare all your options before making a decision. If you have any specific questions, feel free to post back here and i'm sure everyone here will be happy to provide some assistance and guidance. Cheers, Troy

Reply by Jason Ross from ethiSEC pty ltd on Wednesday, 17 September, 2014 - 08:35

Beware of the person with the vested interest, is the advice I always provide to my clients. Typically it's me that has the vested interest as I'm looking to sell services or product but I also like to make sure what I recommend provides value to customers. Unfortunately some people don't take this approach and may be inclined to recommend a product that has a better margin for them. Sometimes though they may also believe it is a better product, but simply stating that none of the vendors here won't suit your needs without providing any evidence is silly if you ask me. Eset has a good reputation but they are relatively new to the AU market and are looking for sales so there are possibly some incentives for the reseller to sell this solution. If you are looking for a Connecting UP solution you won't go far wrong with Webroot or Kaspersky IMO. I've had very good success with Webroot, customers that have had problems in the past don't seem to have these problems with Webroot. I will say that you can get better value from Webroot by buying the per user subscription than the per device price discount here. Traditional AV solutions are very quickly losing their effectiveness against emerging attacks, the models they employ cannot keep pace with polymorphic malware/virus payloads. A number of years back if you had a good up to date AV you would be reasonably safe, today you need at least one more layer IMO to inspect files for nastiness. You also need to make sure you educate your users not to open every file they receive via email. HTH, Jason - 1300 67 22 75