Interview with Vitor Souza: Global Communication Manager of BitDefender Anti-Virus Defense
Part II of our interview with BitDefender Global Communication Manager Vitor Souza
BH: It seems that among the most stressful thing for a small business, where there may be no full-time IT staff, is to make sure that the software does its job of offering protection yet still allows the sharing of information between users. So how customizable are the products offered by BitDefender for a small business user?
VS: The explicit focus in the design of our deployment and management software is to enable businesses to enforce security policies and deploy security solutions with minimal effort. For example, a domain-wide rollout of our antivirus software can be performed by a single person from a console in a matter of minutes.
Another example of this design philosophy is that our products can adapt to their environment - our desktop firewall module, for instance, can be configured to act differently if it’s in a “walled-off” corporate LAN -allowing useful services through than it would act on the open Internet - where it locks down everything in sight.
BH: More and more workers are working remotely, either from home or while traveling. This of course opens new cans of worms for security managers. So how do you see the BitDefender product line working to address these needs of small to medium sized businesses, especially one that might have employees for occasionally work remotely?
VS: With VPN solutions now in wide use, the company intranet is finally within the reach of road warriors. This poses additional security challenges, as these mobile workers access the net from insecure locations and may use the computer for more than just connecting to home base. With BitDefender software installed, however, the network administrator can set events to be acted upon (such as performing a scan when connected to the intranet), enforce domain security policies aso.
BH: Obviously it is crucial for a small business user to keep the various security software applications up to date? Outdated software doesn’t offer full protection to users, and this is become more and more of a problem, so how does BitDefender aid its customers to make the upgrades easier?
VS: Having up-to-date protection is very important, of course. BitDefender business users, quite simply, get access to our latest and greatest for the duration of their licenses and renewal is as easy as clicking a couple buttons in a web interface. The management interface includes license management facilities as well.
BH: Finally, given that the economic slowdown means belt tightening, how important is it to stress to corporate users not to shortchange the security applications in place?
VS: IT security costs are hard to quantify - that’s a known problem. It is very hard to estimate in advance the risks and associated costs, because very few companies have a clear notion of how much their data is worth in the first place. Productivity and cleanup costs are also pretty hard to quantify, as no two security incidents are alike. There’s no reason for which an economic downturn should signal a drop in security expenditure - as long as a company has valuable data, money and customer confidence to lose, the risks will always be there, no matter how the economy turns.
This post is part of the series: BitDefender Offers Anti-Virus Defense and More: Q&A With Vitor Souza
BitDefender’s Vitor Souza speaks about security.
