The Enterprise Administrators Anti-Virus Bill of Rights

written by Andrew Garcia; illustrated by Brian Moore

False positives are bad enough, but eating mission-critical files, hamstringing device drivers or serving as launch vectors for threats are absolute deal breakers for anti-virus products.

Administrators need to be able to control when and to what extent the computing time and resources under their care will be consumed in the name of security. As a rule, anti-virus products should never consume CPU resources unfettered, lock up disk drives

Since most anti-virus detection and cleaning operations are reactive processes, anti-virus companies must provide signatures that are accurate, effective and fast. Automated research capabilities are a must, and global distribution of research labs can he

Enterprise administrators have to be flexible with security policies, as different users working in different environments need varying levels of protection. A security solution should also interact with existing infrastructure components as much as possi

The constantly changing threat landscape requires anti-virus solutions to evolve and adapt to new threat vectors and malware types. Administrators should expect their security solutions will evolve over time, but vendors need to grow in a way that makes s

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