Network Anti-Virus.

Efinity Anti-Virus is a complete anti-virus solution which has network functionality at its core. It provides true cross-platform protection in a single, fully integrated product. The network-centric design provides a host of benefits for the protection of servers, workstations and portables. The groundbreaking architecture maximises protection, while minimising performance and administrative overheads.

Efinity Anti-Virus is fully scalable, equally at home protecting a simple LAN, or the entire enterprise, performing both on-demand and automatic scanning.

A UNIQUE SOLUTION
The term ‘unique’ is used fairly loosely in sales and marketing material but Efinity Anti-Virus is unique because its underlying architecture is unique.

This architecture brings users three immediate benefits:

Files are checked for viruses quantifiably faster by Efinity Anti-Virus than by other products.
Efinity Anti-Virus is installed and updated centrally from one machine across an entire multi-platform, multi-server network. Management and control are maintained by SMT through this centralised configuration.
Performance overheads are kept to a minimum - substantially lower than competing anti-virus software.

These benefits, most notably the low overhead, will be retained no matter how the number of viruses grows over the years because, with Efinity Anti-Virus, scanning speeds are not significantly affected by the number of viruses for which the software is looking.

NETWORK-WIDE INTEGRATION
Efinity Anti-Virus protects workstations and servers in one simple process. Integration across all networks and platforms is supported with flexible configuration to ensure maximum performance in any environment.

Efinity Anti-Virus is a single, cross-platform, fully integrated product.

SERVER SUPPORT

Efinity
Windows NT (Intel)
Windows NT (Alpha)
Novell NetWare
OpenVMS (Alpha)
OpenVMS (VAX)
OS/2
Unix*

WORKSTATION SUPPORT

Linux
Windows NT (Intel)
Windows NT (Alpha)
Windows 95/98
Macintosh
OS/2
Windows for Workgroups
Windows 3.x
DOS

*AIX (PowerPC), Digital Unix (Alpha), FreeBSD (Intel), HP-UX (HP-PA), Linux (Alpha), Linux (Intel), SCO OpenServer (Intel), SCO UnixWare (Intel), Solaris (Intel), Solaris (SPARC).
COMPLETE ANTI-VIRUS SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION
Efinity Anti-Virus has been designed with corporate networks in mind. Competing anti-virus software was designed for the home user market and has grown from this starting point.

Efinity Anti-Virus can scale down easily for smaller installations and single machines. However, the fact that it was developed to deal with the complexity of large multi-server, multi-platform networks makes it the natural choice for these environments.

Summary:

single point installation
automated update
no need to reboot after update installation.

CENTRALISATION AND AUTOMATION
Efinity Anti-Virus’s unique approach allows centralised installation, configuration, updating and reporting. The latest balanced pull and push technologies ensure low network load operation without user intervention.

The centralisation and automation of management functions provides full protection across the network.

SIMPLE AUTOMATIC UPDATES
Updating Efinity Anti-Virus across the network is totally automatic. Once the workstations detect that Efinity has been updated, they automatically download the updated software.

For every new in-the-wild virus, we download a new IDE (identity file), place it on the Internet and alert Efinity of the threat. This alert service allows Efinity to update daily.

CONSISTENT VIRUS DETECTION
Many people get agitated about the number of viruses that a particular anti-virus product will detect.

Our competitors have made much of this. Currently there are over 41,000 known viruses with 300-800 new ones appearing each month.

The truth is that it is largely a numbers game. The total number of viruses depends on the way the developer classifies different strains of the same virus.

The viruses that matter are the ones in the wild, of which there are fewer than 300. In addition, a single virus with a new way of spreading, or one with a damaging new warhead, such as CIH, can be far more devastating than several thousand other new ones. What is important is the level of detection of in-the-wild viruses.

Efinity Anti-Virus monitors all virus entry points, including disks, programs, documents, network drives, CD-ROMs, Internet downloads, email attachments and compressed files.

LOW OVERHEAD
InterCheck technology is the crucial component of Efinity Anti-Virus that makes it different from other anti-virus software.

Low overheads are due to the fact that each file is checked once and a checksum created. It does not have to be checked again unless it is modified. The architecture intelligently determines when files need to be virus checked, maximising user transparency and minimising performance overhead.

Every file accessed is examined to determine whether it is capable of carrying a virus. This Intelligent File Recognition (IFR) system ensures that even viruses in embedded documents are detected.

EFINITY ANTI-VIRUS IS COST EFFECTIVE
Efinity Anti-Virus is not a cheap solution. However, the perception that it is too expensive arises when our corporate prices are compared with those of our competitors’ home user products, thus not comparing like with like.

In terms of what is included in the licence, our file server and corporate licences are very competitive compared with competitors’ licences.

In addition, there are no hidden charges:

Customers only have to buy one licence to protect Efinity, workstations and other servers.
They don’t have to pay extra for support.
All administration and updates are completed by SMT automatically.

INVESTING IN QUALITY
SMT has a deep-seated commitment to investment for the future.

SMT is privately owned and is not subject to the whims of the stock market. It is not called upon to increase profits for its shareholders today at the expense of development tomorrow.

Instead, we can develop long-term strategies which will ensure continuing quality in the years to come.

The engine at the heart of Efinity anti-virus is developed for SMT by Sophos, whose virus experts are drawn from around the world and are of the highest technical calibre.

The following are the key components which ensure the quality of our product:

Virus laboratory - a segregated environment in which the thousands of suspect files received each month are reverse engineered and analysed according to rigorous scientific methods
Quality Assurance suite - every month the software is tested against every virus on every platform