Anti-Virus vs. Deep Freeze

[_techie_]

Just considering an alternative to the continuing frustrations and annoyances of AV...

Does anyone use Faronics Deepfreeze? Do you still utilise AV alongside it, or have you just stopped using AV, as it really does not need to be used, since most viruses come in via Pen Drives and poor internet filtering.

 

I.e. Operate a 'wipe clean' state rather than a highly monitored state (AV) which uses vast amounts of time, with no real gain.

 

How have you got deep freeze setup, and what do you allow?

 

Ta

Mark

[synaesthesia]

Looked into this for one of my primaries a long time ago and it turned out that the pure cost of licensing DF as opposed to running a virtualised network which offers exactly the same thing (but more configurable) was vastly prohibitive.

I probably wouldn't bother with AV though in that instance (on clients) - obviously you'd need it where data is stored and you'd have to take things like roaming profiles into account but for each workstation there'd be very little point. Just added cost for no reason.

[AyatollahPies]

Experimenting with this myself at the moment. At one school I look after, I put Comodo Time Machine on their Windows 7 netbooks. For some reason I also put Sophos on them, which is a resource hog on desktops, never mind netbooks.

 

To my knowledge, USB sticks are not used on them, so the only threat I can see is from t'internet. They aren't connected to the domain.

 

So, I guess I'm on the deep freeze/Comodo/Steady State side of the arguement.

 

At least until a virus outbreak occurs and I see the error in my ways. :-)

[sukh]

Hi

 

I have not used Deep Freeze but to replace this with AV does not protect your PC. If Deep Freeze prevents changes by worms.virus etc...then I can ensure you that many companies would deploy this. I have never come across a company who would remove their AV for such a product.

 

AV is not pain to manage. All products have pros/cons be it Symantec/Sophis/MSFT endpoint etc...I have deployed AV for companies in excess of 50,000 desktop and is managed quite well.

 

And you are right, website filtering and poor AV configurations allow such incidents.

 

It's critical that you have AV on your computers.

 

What issues do you have with AV deployment?

 

Sukh

[GrumbleDook]

One of my worries is that a machine will get infected, and due to patches not always being able to be rolled out asap, and it might spread to non-DF machines ... such as admin workstations, etc. When I have asked folk using DF and similar tools they could not guarantee that it might be a risk.

[Kitkatninja]

At my last place we used HDGuard on our PC's along with AV. While programs like this are great at what they do, they aren't a AV replacement. Any changes to the machine (including infections) are only removed at reboot, that means that virus infections will still propagate through the network, via any USB drives/SD or MMC cards, etc...

 

Besides if Deep Freeze was suppose to do that, the company wouldn't have released their own AV that integrates with it

 

-Ken