Read Before Disabling Your Antivirus Scanner

One of our clients did not know who to trust for improving their business functionality. A piece of software was underperforming, and the manufacturer claimed our antivirus scanner was causing the problem. We told them the antivirus was a necessary security precaution. They could either disable the antivirus and reduce their overall security, or continue sailing at half-mast.

They Disabled Antivirus and Compromised their Security

They opted for compromise – in more ways than one. Their thought was to turn off the antivirus on just a few of their workstations to uphold security to the greatest extent possible while enhancing performance on critical desktops. And their diplomacy compromised their security.

A virus infected the antivirus-deficient workstations in short order, undetected. The antivirus scanner would have caught the infection immediately. Our standard service package includes an agent on each of your workstations that monitors, updates, and performs automatic processes to optimize your IT performance. The agent’s antivirus scanner reports back to us regularly, giving us a bird’s-eye view of your entire network from one place. The safeguard is incredibly valuable because it notifies us as soon as a virus or any other problem is detected. The agent allows us to take immediate action to resolve the problem – cutting down our reaction time from 24 hours to under 1 hour. With our antivirus disabled, we were flying blind and could not identify the threat.

Fortunately, the client could tell something was amiss when files started propagating on their unsecured workstations. They contacted us immediately, and we were able to contain and eliminate the threat before the rest of the network was infected. If we had been just a few hours later, they could have lost business functionality. And billing an average of $60,000 per hour could easily have come to a grinding halt.

Our IT contact was recognized for his critical contributions with an immediate raise. Everyone came out on top, but they are unlikely to disable the antivirus scanner again.