marketplace, with many vendors vying for your money – so which one do you choose? Again, there is not one fits-all answer here. Within the ECA, we use McAfee and have done so for a number of years, but there are other vendors that offer just as good a defence. If you read the IT press, each product will have a reason to claim why it’s the best and can usually have some form of survey to back this up. Most do a reasonable job, but you should be aware that no one package can be 100 per cent effective. One way to improve this is to use more than one security company, and have one product on the perimeter and the other on the client. Viruses can cause serious damage and have over the
past year or so been becoming more and more malicious. They can also spread very fast if there is nothing there to stop them, so this area is not one where you should look to cut costs. They have also become more advanced in what they can do, and have almost reached the realms of science fiction. One high profile virus, Stuxnet, put back the Iranian nuclear industry by controlling centrifuges in their enrichment facilities and was as good as a military strike, in some commentators’ view. If you really cannot afford to put in place a virus defence,
Firewalls Firewalls fall into two categories. They are either perimeter or computer-based in their deployment. The perimeter firewall is usually a purpose-made security appliance that is capable of handling a number of security tasks or a router that sits between your network and the outside world. Its main job is to stop people that you have not authorised getting into your network. Usually the company that provides your internet access will provide a router that can often serve this role. The desktop firewall runs on the computer itself and carries
out a similar job, in that it is there to stop unauthorised access to the computer. As a rule, firewalls on desktop computers are more relaxed or off completely, whereas laptop firewalls need to be more resilient, as they have to contend with vagaries of the real world outside the company network. If you run Microsoft Windows, you will have a built-in firewall that you can use which is free, the efficiency of which improves the newer your operating system is – so Windows 7 has a reasonably configurable solution. There are also third party products, such as Zone Alarm, but these are chargeable and require some knowledge to configure them – but for older operating systems they can serve a purpose. The other trend is that many vendors have brought out
security suites that include all manner of security tools. These can be a good one-stop solution for companies with limited resource and knowledge. That said, these can still be daunting if you do anything other than accept all the default settings.
Virus checkers This is probably one of the most crowded areas in the
58 ECA Today March 2011
then Microsoft do offer a solution for free but only for small businesses running Windows, and is capped at 10 computers. The site to download from is here: http://www.
microsoft.com/security_essentials. We suggest you review the licence agreement yourself as Microsoft have changed this over the past year, as before it did only say home-based business use. One downside of this product is that there is no management console. If you do go with the Microsoft product, you will see it is designed to stop spyware and malware as well.
Viruses can cause serious damage and have over the past year or so been becoming more and more malicious
Patching This area is a no brainer and again is free if you are a Microsoft customer. On your local computer this is called Windows Update, or you can browse to the Microsoft website to run it. The idea here is that as security issues are found, Microsoft
releases patches to fix them and it does this on what it calls Patch Tuesday, which is the second Tuesday of each month. Set this to automatically update on all desktops. For servers a little more care is required, as patches can have side effects, so sometimes it is wise to hang back a little while to let other people test the patches. Again, the severity and your aversion to risk will come into play here. For larger installations, such as we have at the ECA,
you can use Microsoft’s centralised product to download all the patches and distribute according to our schedule. This allows us to stop some patches being distributed if we want and it only means the patches are downloaded once from the website, so saving on bandwidth. The product is called WSUS, or Windows Server Update Service. Again the good news is it’s free.
Spam filters Some people may say that spam is an inconvenience more than a security threat, but it is not that simple. The primary purpose of a spam filter is to stop unsolicited mail from reaching the end user, as it wastes their time. But in addition
SHUTTERSTOCK
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