How to Select The Best Anti-Virus Solution for your Business

One of the key methods in protecting your Business from active and emerging cyber-threats is to have a robust anti-virus / anti-malware solution. This capability is often overlooked or poorly implemented whereby threats can get through the protection with minimal effort.

Cyber threats are increasing by the day and the situation is on the increase. Hackers are now using automated tools to locate vulnerabilities in your systems which they can then take advantage of. Cyber Security is no longer a buzz word and nor is it something that only applies to large corporates. Everyone is game and up for attacks and that means you need to take your cyber awareness very seriously.

Thankfully, anti-virus and anti-malware solutions have progressed significantly and several vendors offer leading-edge capabilities. Next Generation solutions also leverage the likes of behavioural analysis, artificial intelligence to detect and prevent threats and a raft of similar capabilities.  Vendors that are often mentioned include Bitdefender, SentinelOne, CrowdStrike, Sophos Intercept-X to name a few.

However, selecting the right solution need not be a long-drawn-out process. It is recommended that you first understand what you have in terms of assets and then benchmark against what you need to then protect.

So what is involved in the selection process to ensure you get the right cybersecurity solution for your business? Let’s take a look

How to Select the Best Anti-Virus Solution for your Company

Devices: First capture what it is you are trying to protect? Servers, operating systems, applications, storage etc. Ensuring you capture what you want to protect is key in then understanding which solutions will be effective for your business.

Functionality: What is it you need from your anti-virus solution? Regular scanning, heuristics, AI-based scans, behaviour based scan, intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, firewall, web filtering, vulnerability analysis are all functionalities that can form part of a solution.

Architecture: Where are the services/devices that you want to protect? Are they on-premise, in the cloud or as mobile devices. Capture what and how you want to protect your assets so that you can ensure the solution fits that need

Performance: Anti-virus solutions have been notoriously known to consume compute power. However, as computing has got more powerful the impact of these issues have decreased. A  test process of any solution must be performed to ensure there is limited, if any, impact on your devices/services’ performance.

Management and Alerting: Ensure that any solution you implement is easy to manage and can monitor and alert on your devices. This allows for your IT support teams to be notified in the event of any breaches or malware.

Vendor Support: Your solution is only as good as the vendor support you get. Any anti-virus vendor that cares about their solution will ensure they have optimised support services. Aspects relating to upgrades, patches and professional services are all value-added services that should be in the selection criteria

Cloud Managed Anti Virus: Many vendors now offer a cloud-managed solution that also offers EDR (detection and response) services. The setup, configuration, management and support of the solution is often centralised with secure access for the user.

Teck Genius are vendor agnostic and work with numerous security vendors. We would work with you in understanding what you need, evaluate your risk profile and then ensure the right solution is implemented for your business. For more information on how we can help you please contact us here.