Norton Antivirus

One of my responsibilities in my day job is to protect the network from virus attacks. A couple of years ago I performed a major, side-by-side comparison of the major antivirus players in order to determine which protection would be the best for us. This was a critical decision and I needed to do it correctly. This was before "Iloveyou" and "Melissa" made it clear to everyone how important virus protection is to the survival of an IT infrastructure.

We did a reasonably thorough test of the top half dozen products, which included McAfee VirusScan, PC-Cillin and Norton Antivirus (among others). It soon became apparent that the only real virus protection program was Norton Antivirus.

Oh, I will admit that McAfee is good, perhaps a grade of A- would be appropriate. On that same scale, we rated Norton an A+. It's an excellent product, which I also use at home on my own computers.

What makes this product so good? 

• Ease of use - we found we just installed the program and it took care of itself. On our network we enabled automatic downloads of virus definitions, and it worked beautifully. We now get definitions every single day to be sure we are completely protected at all times.
• Email scanning - the newer versions (this was not in the version that we looked at a few years ago) of Norton include the ability to scan emails as they arrive in your email program. This is an absolutely wonderful feature. Viruses are simply removed before they even reach the desktop. I especially liked this at home - I no longer needed to worry about my kid carelessly opening some attachment that looked cool.
• Quarantine - Any viruses that are found are saved in a special place called a quarantine. At work we've found this to be very useful to determine what was going on.
• Liveupdates - Symantec appears to update it's virus definitions once a week on average (occasionally more often if a particularly nasty virus is floating around). 
• Scheduling - At home, I schedule the live update for once per week, while at work it's every single day. Also, we scheduled scans at work every night at midnight, and at home very night at 2:00 AM. The scheduler is very flexible and useful.
• Lots of options - On some systems (user workstations) we want floppies scanned automatically, while on others (servers) it is not necessary. Norton gives us the flexibility to change just about anything to our liking.

Additional Information

• Backing Up Your stuff - Part 1 Backup may seem to be a pain, but it's one of the most important things that you can do to protect your system.
• Backing up your system is an essential part of your security scheme Backups are extremely critical to keep your system secure. If your system is damaged by a virus or an intruder you have a way to recover. Remember, however, that you must think through and test your scheme. 
• Outlook Security Patch If you run Outlook and you want to protect yourself, you should install the Outlook security patch.
• Products - ZoneAlarm Pro ZoneAlarm Pro is quite possibly the best firewall product for personal home use that currently exists. Highly recommended.
• The Ultimate In Virus Protection Learn how to protect your computer and your hard work. Start with a backup plan, install antivirus software and subscribe to newsletters.
• Viruses The most important thing you can do to protect your system is install a virus checker (also known as an anti-virus program). These programs will scan your system for viruses and Trojan horses and delete or repair them. There are several products including those by McAfee and Norton (Symantec).

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