Questions to ask when selecting content security products

Network World, 07/29/02

What are the ease of use vs. depth of protection trade-offs?

Can you schedule virus updates to occur automatically during off-peak hours?

How much bandwidth do these virus updates consume?

How will various inline security products work together in the network? Are there points of failure that will be hard to isolate?

How does the vendor keep up to date on virus definitions (through in-house resources or third parties such as Trend Micro, Norman Virus Control and BitDefender)?

How will you keep track of patches for known vulnerabilities and make sure they are distributed around your network?

Where is the best place to deploy antivirus protection in your network (on clients, servers and/or e-mail gateways)?

How does a content-filter vendor track and update URL lists?

Does the content filter offer you the ability to customize your own filter list?

How context-sensitive is the content filter? Will it block more than you want? you want?

Back to main story: "Looking beyond firewalls for security"

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