By Mayank Sharma, Network Systems Engineer at Child Advocates and a Symantec Customer
At Child Advocates, our focus is helping abused or neglected children find hope through our volunteers who help them transition to a safe environment. As a non-profit organization, we have to make the most of our limited resources, without compromising all the confidential data we are storing. That makes endpoint protection a top priority for us.
With only two staff members to manage our IT infrastructure, including the management of our 13 servers, we are always pressed for time. And we found ourselves constantly dealing with server issues caused by our antivirus solution. It periodically caused CPU spikes in our servers, requiring us to shut them down and restart them as well as reinstalling the antivirus software often, a process that takes hours. This happened several times each month, and we had to manage the antivirus solution on each server individually, for every incident.
While we were experiencing this challenge with our AV solution, we were having an excellent experience with deploying our backup solution from Symantec. Their Backup Exec.cloud solution provided a single console through which we could manage the deployment across our endpoints, and we began to look into their endpoint protection solution as well, which could be managed from the same console.
We decided to deploy Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 2013 and have found that, with our limited manpower, being able to manage the deployment on each server from one web-based console has been a tremendous time saver. I can manage the solution for every server over the Internet from anywhere, to keep our systems up and running. I can also create a set of policies and deploy different configurations to different servers, based on their function. The console gives me a summary of each server’s current status without a need to log into each endpoint. Its footprint is also much smaller than our previous solution, eliminating the CPU spikes that had been causing us problems.
In addition to being easier to manage, Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 2013 has helped us save a lot of money. For the price of a single year of our previous on-premise solution, we have been able to purchase a three-year subscription to Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 2013. And with the extra time I now have, I am free to pursue more important IT projects and look at new initiatives that will help our organization fulfill its mission.
I would recommend that all small businesses take the opportunity to re-evaluate their endpoint protection strategy. The advent of cloud-based services shouldn’t be overlooked; any company that still has to manage servers individually is making things harder than they need to be. Look for the right solution provider to help you keep your patches and updates happening automatically, and your solution should allow you to easily manage policies and deployments from a central location. Cloud-managed solutions can also save you money in today’s world of shrinking IT budgets. Why would anyone not want a less expensive, simpler, more effective endpoint protection solution?