Reply by Chris from Far Edge Pty Ltd on Saturday, 10 September, 2011 - 10:08

Hi, all of the tier one AV vendors have similar pricing - some structure it slightly differently but in general you will usually arrive at a similar price point. You could look at free AV but then you won't get any of the management features (i.e. you can't automatically deploy, forcibly update, report on whether it's active / up to date / etc). In my experience Charities are often at high risk of infection because of the large numbers of volunteers, and honestly the cost of a properly implemented AV is far less than the cost of cleaning up a virus. My only other suggestion would be looking at Kaspersky rather than Symantec. You don't mention PC protection, so I'm not sure if your goal is to protect your PCs as well as the servers?

Reply by from Axem Pty Ltd on Saturday, 10 September, 2011 - 11:34

I agree with Far Edge comments. However Trendmicro has reasonable deal for charities and you might approach them directly. It is my understanding that Microsoft also offers charity pricing for their Forefront security product.

Reply by Neil McLachlan from Co Serve Consulting on Saturday, 10 September, 2011 - 11:42

We suggest that you consider some combination of the AVG Internet Security Business Edition 2012 - AVG File Server Edition 2012 components as well. This may suit your purposes better since the various server licenses can be readily unbundled from end point protection if you wish. Have a look at the options here - http://www.avg.com.au/business-security/ License costs are reasonable with up to 50% off RRP for schools, colleges and universities and up to 30% off for Local, State and Federal Government, churches, charities and other not-for-profits.

Reply by John Kennedy from IT4Business on Monday, 12 September, 2011 - 10:40

i have to ask. How is $250 expensive? The time taken to depoly AVG to 50 work stations is going to be the biggest expense. We exclusivly use and sell Trend products. You install it on your file server, put a line in youe logon script (Or group policy) then its done. Trend will cost you more than $250, in fact, even AVG home would cost you more than that just for your 5x server. If 1x workstation gets infected, its going to take 1-3 hours to fix it. How much is that worth to you? Cost of someone to fix it, and the lost productivity of a staff member. Of if its your server that gets hit. How much do you value 1 day of no productivity for all your staff? 50 people not accessing your servers for 1x day is a lot more than $250

Reply by Grant Laing from Blended IT Solutions on Thursday, 15 September, 2011 - 21:38

Hi, Yes, having no AntiVirus protection is not recommended, and will cost a lot more than this to fix afterwards, or even now as the systems may already be infected. But enough about this, now onto the solution. The most basic protection should be the 4 servers, and the 50 desktops at the least. You could get this through donortec or we have another promotion of an AV solution for $10 per seat. (if interested please email me). But at $5.00 per machine that is very cheap. If you can't afford the mailbox solution, then the best option is stop it before it gets to your exchange server. We have a anti-spam solution that will filter it before it gets to your network, and will pick up the viruses and other malware that comes in through email. The other good option is to use group policy and non-admin users to make the network more secure, which will also stop the virues from being able to run. A lot of companies forget this simple step, as sometimes it is too hard to train the users that they can't just install anything they like. If you want to discuss any of these please email me. Thanks Grant

Reply by from AD Consulting on Tuesday, 20 September, 2011 - 10:08

I would recommend you to contact the AV Vendors : Symantec, TrendMicro, McAfee, Kaspersky and of course Microsoft ForeFront( so far one of the best solution for exchange). Also it's important to mention that you have an Hypervisor running Virtual Machines and I would recommend the anti-virus to be installed on the hypervisor as well and not all anti virus can deal with this situation.