If you’ve never dinged your car (other than brushing bumpers while you’re parking), you may not appreciate how good it can be to have adequate car insurance. Likewise, if you have been spared the pain of a PC that slows down or dies because of a virus, software for protection against viruses may seem more of a luxury than a necessity. Yet in terms of the financial outlay to have virus protection compared to potential productivity loss if you don’t, good virus protection software can be astonishingly inexpensive. In addition, the chance of infection somewhere in an organisation without virus protection can rapidly converge on 100% as the total number of employees rises.
This is not a suggestion for virus protection software companies to increase their prices; competition and a free market thankfully protect us from that anyway. However, it is a call for virus protection to be implemented systematically, whether your business is big or small. It can save you from corruption of your data, software, registry, add-ins and plug-ins. It can spare you the frustration of a PC that refuses to respond, the embarrassment of a PC that starts to email all your contacts without you knowing about it, and the legal hassles concerning breach of customer data confidentiality, not to mention the threat of identity or financial theft.
As IT evolves and BYOD policies allow employees to use their personal computing devices for work, good virus protection is likely to become ever more cost-effective. True, it’s not a legal requirement, although in some industries, the law means that virus protection is in effect mandatory. Yet the consequences are too catastrophic and the potential savings too big to ignore it. So if it helps, consider virus protection to be like car insurance, building insurance or even health vaccines – a necessary part of staying in good business shape.