Smart strategy reduces costs

AgResearch Simplifies Antivirus Management with eTrust Antivirus

Company Summary

AgResearch Ltd is an independent, Crown-owned research and development company, headquartered at Ruakura, Hamilton, New Zealand.

The scientists at AgResearch aim to improve the lives of New Zealanders with better life science based products and services. Research and development is focused on ways of improving New Zealand’s primary industry expertise, through the development of new biotechnology-based food industries, ‘clean green’ food industries and a healthy, safe environment.

Safeguarding commercially sensitive information is vital to AgResearch’s success.

Securing Multiple Sites Centrally

“Any business values information highly,” says AgResearch’s Technical  Manager Stuart Dillon-Roberts. “AgResearch is no different.

 “We have a mobile workforce, spread across the whole country at our five main sites and additional subsites,” says Dillon-Roberts. “Ease of management and solid support were crucial issues for us when selecting antivirus software.”

AgResearch needed antivirus that could be deployed and managed centrally. “Our technical team is located in Dunedin. We wanted to be able to deploy and manage our antivirus software from there,” says Dillon-Roberts.

 AgResearch is running Microsoft Windows 2003 on its servers and XP on the desktops.

Solution

After comparing eTrust with competing products, AgResearch selected eTrust Antivirus v7 for its antivirus upgrade. “We had been using an earlier version of eTrust and were impressed with the level of support CA provided,” says Dillon-Roberts.

The sale was completed through the national CA reseller, Gen-i NZ from its Hamilton location. Gen-i NZ is a key supplier of AgResearch’s information technology of over seven years’ standing.

 It was important for AgResearch to be able to upgrade with minimum downtime. “eTrust has a nice tool that allows us to upgrade with minimal disruption to our users,” says Dillon-Roberts. “We can select a machine or range of machines to upgrade and the installation runs in the background without the user knowing.”

In addition to CA’s follow-the-sun support and eTrust’s centralised management, eTrust is cost-effective. “eTrust gave us some smart tools for managing our security at an affordable price.”

Responsive support centre provides peace of mind

AgResearch was sold on the strength of CA’s support. “The last thing you want to be doing when facing a virus problem is to have to search around trying to find patches and signature updates,” says Dillon-Roberts. “CA’s support allows us to get prompt solutions to our problems, thereby minimising risk to our organisation.”

Centralised management is also of great benefit to AgResearch. “Our staff are spread across New Zealand. For our IT support Team, being able to log-in and see what is happening with each client – whether it has up to date signature files and so on – is extremely useful. My team is more efficient and our staff can work securely,” says Dillon-Roberts.

New features in eTrust AV v7 give AgResearch added protection. “The boot time check is a great new feature. It checks the machines before the person gets to do any work which is important when people may have been using their laptops outside our system – at home for example. Each time a machine is reintroduced to our environment it is checked and updated by the boot time check,” says Dillon-Roberts.

Smart Antivirus Reduces Cost

The implementation of eTrust Antivirus v7 has added to AgResearch’s security while offering its IT department a well supported, easy to manage solution.

“eTrust has successfully quarantined all malicious code our system has encountered,” says Dillon-Roberts. “What makes eTrust so valuable is the time and money saving features it provides.”

Virus protection policies apply at AgResearch’s sites. “eTrust has an impressive feature that senses the closest signature distribution site to the user, regardless of where that user’s ‘home’ updater is. In practice it means that every user on site is compliant with that site’s virus protection policy. At the same time it reduces WAN traffic.”

eTrust a comprehensive solution

“Management and support were our two biggest concerns when selecting new AV software,” says Dillon-Roberts. “Our support team has been very happy with CA’s support centre and the management features of the software have made it very valuable. “eTrust gives us superb antivirus protection at a competitive price. It also saves us money through its smart management functions.”