Choosing what anti-virus solution to engage for corporate protection can be a particularly difficult one. You may have to justify your choice to the board or defend your decision to the rest of the IT department. However, if you have been diligent none of the above will be a problem. But where do you start?

Anti-virus developers continuously strive to detect any new virus as it appears in the wild. Their job is to ensure that they have a virus signature or pattern file to deliver to their users to stop its spread and to protect their customers' interests.

Developers also strive to be one step ahead of the virus writers so that envisaged problems are catered for prior to the actual problem-code being released. They must also deliver a solution that is easy to use, administer, roll-out and manage, with excellent detection rates and the ability to clean and reinstate files with little disruption. And they do.

Using one anti-virus product doesn't preclude a user from other developers' technology though. Many solutions enjoy the benefits of more than one available scanning engine, from several 'rival' anti-virus vendors. How many of these engines are used within the solution will depend on the user's license but the choice is there to provide that little bit extra. So if you prefer one solution's scanning engine but another's update and support mechanisms you may be able to have your cake and eat it!

Antigen 6.0 is one such product. It offers the choice of five extremely well known and respected scanning engines, from Norman Data Defense, Network Associates, Sophos, InoculateIT and Vet. The choice of scans is also available to the user, inasmuch as they can configure real-time or manual scans to suit their corporate environment.

Installation is simplified with this enterprise-ready solution. From a single location Antigen can be remotely installed to all Exchange servers and managed from a centralized location; even remote administration via the web is possible. Antigen also delivers a solution to unwanted file attachments. Blocking file attachments using a rule-based filter, Antigen can remove them from emails prior to delivery using file name, file type, etc. to identify them and, depending on your configuration, simply remove or delete the unwanted files.

Another area that our reviewer particularly liked was the seamless protection provided to all mailboxes. Unlike some anti-virus products Antigen does not use MAPI to log into individual mailboxes and therefore doesn't need to poll the Exchange Server to look for any new ones.

One thing to note that is extremely important to your security, after installation the administrator must change access rights within DCOM, otherwise anyone can log in. Updates are automatically acquired and pushed out to the servers with the auto-update feature and support is offered 24-hours, seven days a week. These are important factors for any anti-virus solution because by the nature of the threat, the solution must be available at all times to counteract any new risk as they emerge. Time and tide wait for no man!

Following a thumbs-up for the GUI and the available features, the results that Antigen 6.0 produced were extremely encouraging. This showed that the detection and disinfection rates matched the ease with which Antigen could be remotely installed, rolled out and managed.

In the first test, where the solution was required to detect all the viruses in the December 'wild list', the results provided ensured that customers using Antigen 6.0 were well protected with its 100 percent return. Even the polymorphic viruses in the wild list, which numbered 1,949, were all identified and dealt with, leaving the system virus-free with yet another impeccable 100 percent score.

Macro viruses can sometimes cause solutions to falter but with the new Antigen 6.0 these were easily identified and resulted in total detection and disinfection. However, compressed files will always be the bugbear for anti-virus vendors across the globe and Antigen is no exception. With a total of 57 compressed files it returned a detection rate of 82.61 percent, a far higher accomplishment than many of its near rivals.

Continuing on down the results trail, we put this solution through its paces with our penultimate test to see just how quickly it could deliver an infected file after detection and disinfection. This test returned a time of 100 seconds, which is pretty fast by any one's standard.

Continuing with the final test we had to admit that not only has the product continued to improve from the administrator's point of view, but also from the detection and disinfection rates, which provided some of the best scores that we have seen. Disinfection reached the heady heights to deliver a final 100 percent score. This accumulated into an excellent and almost perfect result in all of our tests.

SC On-Line
SC Magazine
www.scmagazine.com