McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 7.0 By Jay Munro June 30, 2003

• Product: McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 7.0
• Direct Price: $40 per node and up
• Requires: Microsoft Windows NT, 2000, or XP
• Company Info: Network Associates Technology Inc., 888-847-8766, www.mcafeeb2b.com

Editor Rating:

The latest addition to McAfee's line of corporate antivirus solutions, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 7.0, gives companies strong virus protection with lower maintenance requirements. VirusScan runs only on Windows NT, 2000, and XP, but it performs double duty, replacing VirusScan 4.51 on desktops and NetShield 4.5 on file servers.

The Achilles' heel in any enterprise's virus protection is end users who disable the software to save time. To help minimize this, McAfee has improved performance and given administrators better tools to make sure protection is on and up to date. For example, the new File Scan Caching technology improves performance over time by remembering scanned areas and not rescanning unmodified files in future passes.

In our performance degradation testing, VirusScan's system impact was less than 4 percent— barely noticeable on today's fast machines. New risk-based scanning lets administrators prioritize scanning requirements based on risk of infection. For example, when Outlook, Excel, or Word is running, the on-access scanner can be set to use heuristics to find new macro viruses, while a static file server may scan only for known patterns. As with previous versions, VirusScan 7.0 provides alerts to the sender, administrator, or designated recipients in the event of an infection.

Keeping VirusScan updated has gotten easier through the companion McAfee AutoUpdate 7.0. The new version adds HTTP support to simplify firewall maintenance. Proxy servers are even easier to configure, as AutoUpdate allows local client Internet Explorer or IT manually configured proxy settings.

Though performance, administration, and updating all play their part, catching a virus before it does damage is the main point. VirusScan now scans and cleans memory processes during on-demand scans to catch malicious code such as SQL Slammer and Klez, which create infective processes not written to disk. Scanning currently running processes first before scanning a hard drive, VirusScan can stop recurrent infections that hard drive–only scanners cannot.

As always, VirusScan is in a league with the best AV protection money can buy.