The best Anti-Virus Product for Ships ?

[Wasim Kayani]

Even though we use VSAT on almost 90% of our ships, Anti-Virus is still a problem when downloading the daily updates. MCafee for example, wants to pull down almost 10Mb daily which doesn't cost us any more but can be pain on a 128Kb link.

Does anyone have any good experience of AV products especially those of which download small updates ? Sophos ? AVG ?

[Youri Hart]

I understand that Sophos and Vizada aren't the same company I wouldn't be a good IT engineer if I didn't knew that :)

Sophos has been delivering her products to the market for years and started with Globe Antivirus when Globe requested it afterwards other companies such as Stratos and Vizada followed with exactly the same solution.

We know about the dump price that Sophos has for the maritime marketed and that it is offered with airtime because as Airtime provider you care about the time spend online contect provisioning and not the software in such way that it is why a off the shelf product has been chosen :). As you said you try to offer a complete package to your customer wich is good because we shall all do what we shall do best :).

[Louis Liu]

Can anyone tell me which edition of NOD32 anti-virus is better to be used onboard vessel(6-8 computers)? when i check with NOD32 support about the update, they told the size of offline update is about 20.2MB, it's impossible to send this size of file to ship by email.

Regards,
Louis

[Youri Hart]

Well NOD32 is not 100% correct in this one. You can send the updated files over every week but the problem then is that the files will grow and eventually it is possible that you have to send over a file of 11MB not acceptabel.

That is why we call our NOD32 solution the only real Maritime Antivirus solution. We don't have to send CDs like Sophos to update the engine our updates cotain both engine as signature updates. Together with ESET we have modified the NOD32 solution and did some intensive programming to come with the solution that will make sure that you never receive such large files.

So NOD32 of the market is a good solution for virus protection but updating will lead to problems You have to use a adapted version that we offer.

[Youri Hart]

Little update: To be clear we haven't changed the software we modified the updates to be compatible with sequential updating and be incremental as well. This ofcourse with the complete confirmation of ESET that our solution is proven stable.

[Remon van Gijn]

@Louis Liu, please send an email to [e-mail] and you will be send a whitepaper explanation of the issue, and the way it was resolved.

[QUENET VIVIAN]

I'm sure you are a good engineer, but on the sales side, you should know that the last thing we want is precisely to offer the same product as our competitor which you mention. The choice was made after consulting what was available in the market and the reason we choose Sophos is because it doesn't require requires complexe installation, no huge monthly fees and most important, works very well. If we were only interested in airtime, we would ressel your solution which consummes more airtime per month vs the Sophos one (around1,6MB vs around 1,12MB depending on the definitions). Cheers!

[QUENET VIVIAN]

I'm refering to what you replied on 20 January at 3:12pm.on this forum.
Quote
What if I tell you that our updates for our antivirus service are only 400KB a week MAX! on average
Unquote
So for me 4 times 400KB is 1.6MB, not 1 MB, right? So NOD 32 uses more airtime.
I agree that it's better not to continue this discution on this forum. Bye

[Gary McDonald]

As an independent maritime IT consultant I am often asked about anti-virus solutions (click www.itatsea.net for more details ;) )

In my experience it really depends on the clients requirements. Quite often they would like a solution that they can manage in house using internal IT resources without having to pay monthly fees for a managed service.

I personally use ESET on my office business equipment as I feel it offers the best protection and performance for the price tag. However keeping this solution updated by sending updates over email can be quite challenging, but not impossible as Youri and Remon have commented.

Sophos is nice and easy to get installed and clients can send out update files without much work. But as others have said, it is important to keep the engine updated too, this can be costly if sending them over Inmarsat circuits. But would the cost of the airtime needed to send Sophos engine updates over the satellite be less expensive than paying for a managed solution? There is always the CD method but its far from a perfect solution.

With the advent of Fleet broadband and decreasing VSAT prices this will become less of a problem technically speaking.

As with most things in life its a trade off and its up to the client to make a decision based on budgets, required level of protection and manageability.

Its nice to see open discussion about it!

[Youri Hart]

Totally agree with you. As I said a few reply's above, it all comes down to customer demands, budget etc.

Why is person A driving a BMW and the other a Audi? both are able to purchase either car but something have made them choose for that BMW or Audi :)