New Guy

  • 19 June 2012
  • 5 replies
  • 22 views

  • Fresh Face
  • 3 replies
Hi, All,
 
I 'm a retired IT administrator, whose responsibilities included managing corporate antivirus service on 5000 computers. Now I'm just another customer, but I haven't lost the urge to see how things work -- or don't. Trying Webroot for the first time. Hope I like it. -- TC

5 replies

Userlevel 7
Hello TC, Welcome to the Webroot Community Forums. 😃
Userlevel 7
Welcome to the community!  They say always learn at least one new thing a day, because you know you're always going to forget a few things over time, and if you don't replace them, eventually you'll forget everything. ;)
 
I'm sorry that our SecureAnywhere business stuff wasn't around when you were working on that.  The stuff I've heard from IT people regarding conventional AV solutions really makes me wonder.  Things like spending hours a week having to re-image infected machines, pains with dedicated servers for AV, deployment to each computer taking 15-45 minutes in person, definition updates and automatic updates killing the networks, and epic multi-day outbreak containment. We're hearing this sort of stuff because the admins are comparing that against SecureAnywhere's lack of those kind of problems. :)
 
Is that the sort of stuff you encountered in your experience with other AV endpoin protection? Trading the horror stories and valiant wins is always fun.
 
And of course we're here for any questions or comments you have regarding the consumer side as well.
Userlevel 7
Badge +56
Hello TC and Welcome to the Webroot Community Forums! ;)
 
TH
Userlevel 7
@ wrote:
They say always learn at least one new thing a day, because you know you're always going to forget a few things over time, and if you don't replace them, eventually you'll forget everything. ;)
Good one Kit. I had to laugh when I read this. :D
When I got to my senior years I had to invest in "Post-it" pads to remember things. lol
 
I retired at the end of '07 from a school corporation IT dept. in Indiana, after about 9 years total service. We had about 5,000 desktops over most of that time, with about 20% administrative and teacher staff, and the rest student machines. Yes, we had all the encounters with server-based AV. We had a couple of years with Panda Antivirus, but they were less than adequate in terms of support and very expensive, both in $ (they refused to accept bamboo shoots), and in desktop resources, as well as update volume. There was always something to do in the administrative realm with Panda.
 
Then we switched to Sophos, which had much better support, and the era of having a local server distribute updates over our much faster network really cut down on the upstream data usage our ISP was seeing. One update from corporate, and the rest of the traffic was local, and to some extent, doable over non-business hours.
 
Of course the server had to be babysat, so I went from learning to speak Panda to learning the care and feeding of one of (at that time) very few Windows servers in the system.
 
We had our share of shady users, downloading infected bootleg movies, sharing music files, etc... mostly at the bigger school buildings -- middle and high schools. It was often necessary to go to a new computer lab over the summer and install the endpoint client on 60 machines in an afternoon, scan and remove malware and viruses, and then go back and feed and burp the server.
 
Rogue access points and the occasional spurt of criminal activity incidental to computer use just made things interesting.
 
There is more to tell, but it was years ago, and I have literally and figuratively moved on. Now I'm sort of a retiree homesteader in rural Tennessee, with only my own network to worry about, with rare bouts of tech support for a neighbor or family member.
 
Anyway, thanks for the welcome, and I'll be around
 
TC

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