Do virus scans save money

I would venture you won't get accurate information, because a) companies don't know, and b) if they did know they wouldn't say.

The closest equivalent is in disaster recovery/business resumption planning.

For example, even though we had virus scanning, we still got a major virus hit 18 months ago. The email system was down for 2 days. But those two days were Saturday and Sunday, during a less than stressful time for the company, so we have no way of knowing how many people were affected.
To calculate the amount of money saved (cost avoided to be exact), you would have to come up with an average impact(amount of time lost) due to viruses during a year, and then an average labor rate. Then you have to do a probability assessment on whether there would be a bottom line impact.

The reality is average is dangerous. During the traditional slow periods like the summer, losing the email system for an hour may have a minimal impact on the company -yes there will be some productivity lost, but most employees are not 100% productive for their entire working week, so its harder to assess. On the other hand, if the marketing people are emailing each other about a proposal with a fixed deadline, and are cutting that deadline close,then the impact could be horrendous.

It helps to do a best case/worst case sometimes.

I am convinced that virus scans do save money, because I monitor the number of viruses stopped from infesting desktops by the virus scanners on our mail servers - if we had no effective anti-virus protection, we'd have to have more people working the help desk and as desktop techs.

James

No real way to say, because how can you determine what would have happened if you hadn't been checking for viruses? I know that our virus scanning system traps over 1,000 viruses a month, each of which could destroy systems or bring down out network! The one system that didn't have virus scanning we found the hard way when it was destroyed by a virus. Everything on the disk mangled. It was, of course, the CEO's system! Fortunately, we had a backup. So I would never even consider being without agood scanner.