In the today’s world, a business succeeds or fails on its technology.
We keep all our important information on computers so it makes sense to do everything we can to protect them from harm.
In this Blog we’ll demystify the terminology and tell you how best to protect your critical IT assets.
Anti-Malware and Anti-Virus
Definition of Malware and Viruses.
Malware is malicious software, written with the explicit of purpose of infecting and causing harm to the infected system. A Virus is just a type of Malware, but the term virus is used as a blanket term for all Malware due to its wide spread use. To protect against Viruses and Malware, we use Anti-Malware and Anti-virus products.
What Anti-Virus actually protects you from.
Antivirus protects you from malicious email attachments, nefarious sites and infected external devices like USB keys and hard drives. It is extremely important to have Anti-Virus, if you don’t, and an email you send infects someone else, you could be financially and legally responsible. You wouldn’t drive your car without 3rd party insurance and you shouldn’t operate your computer without antivirus.
Anti-Virus provides an extremely high level of protection, but isn’t perfect.
It’s important to understand that no antivirus will protect against everything, as virus writers are constantly working to defeat antivirus products, the antivirus companies are always playing catch up to maintain protection levels. Because of this, your antivirus is only as good as it’s last update.
Free antivirus gives a good level of protection, but doesn’t offer the same protection as a paid product.
Retail antivirus products provide more frequent updates than free products and include support for when things do get through.
Businesses require a higher level of protection and this is where a Managed Antivirus solution is used.
Managed Antivirus reports to your IT provider on antivirus status, provides monitoring on the overall health of your computers, and allows early intervention and proactive maintenance.
Give your business the best chance by acquiring a managed antivirus product from IN2Tech.
The cost of a managed service is the same or less than a retail product.
Anti-virus is to a computer as Seat belts & Airbags are to a car.
Antivirus will protect you 99% of the time, but things will get through. A wrong click on a website or email is all it takes to open a breach.
Much like you wouldn’t drive without your seat belt on, you shouldn’t use a computer without up to date antivirus installed.
Virus’s and Malware are essentially the same, but they have different attack methods and different ways of spreading.
Your antivirus product will pick up most things, but to be fully protected you need a dedicated Anti-Malware product as well.
Even with up to date Antivirus and Anti-Malware products installed, you are only protected from most threats.
In a worst case scenario we need a fall back position that is completely independent of the computer, and that’s where backups come in.
Reasons to implement a backup service.
If Anti-Virus is Third Party insurance, a good backup system is Comprehensive Insurance. Because Anti-Virus isn’t perfect, and hardware can always fail, there is always a chance of data loss.
Common causes of data loss include Virus and Malware infections, hardware failure, theft and accidental deletion .
A well planned backup solution removes the risk of losing everything, and allows your business to continue operating in a small amount of time.
The best backups are completely external to the computer and the business so that whatever effects the business doesn’t damage the backups.
Before the advent of high speed internet, this meant physically removing he backup media (usually tapes or cartridges) to a remote storage facility. Now, we use the internet to store the data in secure data centers at a fraction of the cost.
Talk to us about the many options IN2TEch can provide to protect your business.
Keep your tech serviced.
Just like a car a computer needs to be regularly serviced by a trained professional.
A professional service will include checking the computer logs, ensuring protective software is up to date and functional, installation of security updates and software patches.
It will also include the hands on task of checking if the computer is fit for duty. Many times companies are losing money because staff are waiting for their computers to ‘catch up’.
This is completely unnecessary and is flagged during service for actions such as system replacement or upgrade.
You can mitigate all sorts of problems simply by having your computers regularly serviced.