Are viruses costing SA corporations millions?

The need to monitor e-mail messages for dangerous, offensive or confidential content has never been more urgent. Attacks on major institutions are a daily occurrence. Mail systems worldwide distribute the most severe viruses within hours of the offenders releasing them. These viruses are able to cripple your e-mail system and corporate network in a matter of minutes.

Johan Coertze of BIDVest Network Solutions says the figures are astounding. "We provide a mail filtering solution for our clients, reporting on virus activities on a weekly basis. As an example, the total viruses filtered and successfully blocked in the week 9 to 16 May numbered a whopping 50 927. This week was no exception to the normal pattern."

However, companies do not often see the hidden cost of viruses, says Coertze. "One must look at the total impact, which includes network bandwidth. Through filtering traffic at a central point, unwanted e-mails do not reach the desktop and therefore do not utilise bandwidth. The bandwidth remains available purely for business traffic as opposed to virus traffic."

Coertze says products that perform single vendor anti-virus scanning do not provide sufficient protection if not updated regularly. "It is easier to update a single mail filtering system rather than try and update thousands of PCs. Our system automatically updates itself on a daily basis to protect clients from new viruses.

"Mail is monitored and quarantined or deleted based on a policy that is selected by the client. The system secures your environment and protects data, as well as preventing potential loss of productivity due to systems being down. Without a mail filter policy in place, the mail will reach the mail server which must process it. The mail server will deal with thousands of e-mails, which means the customer will need to upgrade it to cope with huge volumes of mail. The end-user also saves time by only reading business-related e-mails.

"Products restricted to a single anti-virus engine will not protect against e-mail exploits and attacks as they do not receive daily updates. If you have 3 000 desktops as well as a number of laptops, you need to make sure that all 3 000 have anti-virus software at all times. E-mail is likely to become the means for installing backdoors (Trojans) and other harmful programs to help potential intruders break into your network."

BIDVest Network Solutions believes many competitors offer comparative products but the real difference is in the internal processes and intellectual capital. "You still need some kind of administrative control. Our intellectual capital is of the best. We make sure our necessary processes are in place to ensure our mail filtering solution is updated constantly," says Coertze.