Guarding the Corporate Network
From your network and servers to workstations, Panda’s Global Virus Insurance protects you from nasty intruders.
- By Barry Shilmover
- April 01, 2001
When will
the next computer virus strike? No one knows for sure, but you can count
on it being sooner rather than later. Do you have to be reminded of the
damage the Melissa and LoveLetter bugs caused corporate networks? One
tool that can help you in this fight is Panda Software’s Global Virus
Insurance.
Designed
specifically for the corporate arena, this suite consists of Panda Administrator
tools, Panda Antivirus for Networks, Panda Antivirus Platinum and Panda
Antivirus 6.0.
The administrator
tools set the Panda package apart from its competitors. With these tools,
the three-stage Global Virus Insurance installation process — network,
server and workstation — can be accomplished from a single server. For
the network admin under a time crunch, this makes package installation
swift.
Loading Panda
Antivirus for Networks installs the antivirus program and engine. To load
the engine to your network servers, you use the Panda Administrator tools
to search for and select the proper servers. Clicking the Install button
completes the task. Network and SMTP-based alerts then can be configured
to notify you of any detected viruses. In the final step, you load the
antivirus applications to your workstations and any services running on
your remote servers. The domain logon script can be modified, if desired,
to allow clients to load the antivirus software during login.
As I put
Global Virus Insurance through its paces, I liked the way it offers real-time
virus protection. On the other hand, competing applications such as Norton
use a proxy approach that scans e-mail and files at set intervals. Global
Virus Insurance will even detect viruses within FTP files before they’re
downloaded to a hard drive.
Also, I was
impressed at how efficiently the applications handle updates. You can
do this two ways. The first, for renewing the antivirus program when a
new version is available, is called an Upgrade. The second, for renewing
the virus signature file (PAV.SIG), is simply called Update. Via the Panda
Administrator, you download upgrades and updates from the Internet to
the administrator computer and then push these to your network systems.
 |
| Panda
Administrator lets you install Global Virus Insurance from a single
server. |
Of course,
nothing is perfect, and there is a downside to using Global Virus Insurance
— after installation, servers must be rebooted, including those for Exchange
and Windows 2000. In a production environment, this isn’t always possible.
Still, looking beyond this, Global Virus Insurance is a powerful, comprehensive
and flexible antivirus solution for the corporate network.
About the Author
Barry Shilmover, MCSE+I, MCT, owns Shilmover Consulting Services, a Microsoft
Solution Provider specializing in Windows NT/2000 and Exchange 5.5/2000 solutions.
He has co-authored books that include Windows 2000 System Administrator’s
Black Book and Exchange 5.5 Exam Cram, both from Coriolis Press.