Good Antivirus is essential to business. Without it you risk everything… literally everything in your business, and then some. Infections and malware threaten to lock you out of your data with encryption that you cannot undo and may leave you having to restore to a backup, if you have them and if they haven’t also been encrypted. I have heard horror stories about local businesses who have been infected with any one of the latest myriad of malware or viruses and have had to pay thousands or even MILLIONS of dollars to even be able to get to their own data so they can continue their business functions. And that doesn’t even include the cost of cleaning up and cleaning out the infection. Many of these will lay dormant in your systems waiting until they have been able to encrypt weeks or months of old backups before they encrypt your live data, so you have no other option but to pay their ransom. I’ve even heard of companies in town that have paid the ransom, got their data back and got back to work, but didn’t make absolutely sure that the infection was gone. So just over a year later, the malware reactivated and they had to go through the same ordeal and pay the ransom AGAIN! This can be enough of a burden to put any business out of business, especially in these strange financial times.

So what do you do? How do you prevent it from happening?  Well, nothing is absolute, if you are counting on any one thing to protect you, then you should not be surprised when that one thing fails. That is why you have to have a layered approach to your protection strategy. Which brings me back around to the product at hand… Vipre Antivirus for Business.

Like many other products, Vipre Antivirus for Business uses a multi-layer approach for keeping your data safe.  They break down their protection into 4 layers, each with multiple options and offerings to help protect you and your valuable data.

1. Endpoint protection
2. Email protection
3. Network protection
4. User/Data protection

Right now, let’s focus on the Vipre Endpoint protection, we can dig into the others later.

Endpoint protection is what you typically think of when you think of antivirus.  It is the software that runs on the endpoints (user’s computers) and acts as an important part of the line of defense for your information.  So what factors should play in to your decision in purchasing an endpoint protection system?

• Effectiveness – Of course, the first thing that you want to look at is, does it work?  According to the AV-Test Institute, an independent research institute for IT security, Vipre Endpoint Security rates 6/6 in their latest test and caught 99+% of all malware attacks.
• Performance/Usability – Antivirus that works is important, but if it bogs down your computer most of the time, then you might just disable it, making it useless.  So it has to work without slowing you down.  Or if it is always tagging valid files as virus, you will lose trust in it and stop using it. According to the same study above, it works better than most at accurately detecting malware and keeping false positives to a minimum.  That being said, there were some false positives detected by the software, so not perfect, but good.
• Manageability – Great antivirus is wonderful, but if your IT staff have to run around and touch hundreds of computers to monitor what they have found, and make sure that the software is working properly, that doesn’t work well for business.  Vipre Endpoint Protection has a great web interface to push out and manage their software, as well as clean up any infections from their site manager dashboard online.
• Support – And of course, what good is a product if you can’t get ahold of anyone to help with it if you are in a crisis.  Vipre has technical support professionals on the phone 24/7 to help.

With plenty of support options to get you set up and a well rated product to keep you safe, Vipre Endpoint Protection is a good addition to any company’s security plan.

Check it out and get up to speed.