Aside from someone breaking into your network to steal confidential client or patient data, the worst thing that can happen to a computer at your office or home is for that machine to acquire a virus. Viruses are everywhere. On floppies that employees bring to the office or friends bring to your house, on CD Roms that have been created to share data, and in e-mail that comes to via the internet. Once their in your business network, they can travel freely from machine to machine, via your e-mail system and as part of files that are legitimate programs or documents stored on your network servers or workstations and infect every machine in your offices.
About 25% of my business comes from going into a clients office to remove a virus that has infected their systems after the fact. This usually means that they have computers that are non-usable while they wait for me to arrive, and they have one or more employees not able to work during that period. It can take several hours to diagnose and repair the damage caused by a single virus. When you consider my hourly rate, the cost of one or more employees not being able to work, and the lost productivity of your organization during the down-time of the computer, the cost of eliminating a virus and restoring the lost data and operating system on a machine can easily cost $800.00 or more per machine! How can you prevent viruses? Fortunately there's an extremely easy and inexpensive solution: install an anti-virus program on every machine you own! The cost is about $35.00 per computer (yes, you do need to buy a separate copy for each machine you own!), but if the anti-virus software catches even a single virus, it will have paid for itself many times over. My personal favorite is Norton Anti-Virus by Symantec.Once you install Norton Anti-Virus on your system, it takes you through the process of registering the product and enables something called "Live Update," a feature that will automatically download the most recent virus updates on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, ensuring that you have the best possible protection on your machines. Additionally, Norton Anti-Virus will do a "Stealth" scan of your files and programs in an attempt to protect you from any viruses which have not been included in their definitions base. If a new virus is found and it cannot be repaired, Norton Anti-Virus will move the file to a secure area on your hard drive and give you the opportunity to send the newly found potential virus to "SARC," the division of Symantec that is constantly researching new viruses and developing new ways to rid your computers of those viruses. The feature I like most about Norton Anti-Virus is the "E-mail Protection" that is part of the software. Once activated, it literally scans every e-mail BEFORE it even arrives at your computer! If a virus is found in the e-mail, you can either attempt to repair it, isolate the file or DELETE IT before it can do any damage. I have my e-mail set to DELETE all infected files BEFORE they can even hit the hard drive.Here's an example of Norton's capabilities: One of my clients has several staff members who frequently travel to eastern block countries in Europe. Many of those countries are responsible for replicating e-mail based viruses because the companies based there simply cannot afford to purchase anti-virus software. Last year I set-up 5 new IBM A20P laptops for those executives to use, both in their local Chicago offices and when they are traveling. In order to keep the virus definitions up to date on those machines, I configured Norton Anti-Virus to connect to the Live-Update servers at Norton whenever a connection to the internet is available. Every one of those five laptops has been subject to attacks by viruses and Norton Anti-Virus has found and resolved every one of them. No programs or data have ever been lost because of a virus!
Don't let a virus take over your computer for any reason. Install Norton Anti-Virus, or another virus program, and go about your work with a safer computer.
