I work for a medium size business in Australia. I’m currently employed as the Desktop Support Engineer.
We recently faced a situation where we had to upgrade our antivirus systems or risk being out of date and leaving un-protected systems if the antivirus was updated the next version.
No biggie right? Simply force out the software to your desktop fleet our NT guys say. They raise the Change Request and then go and send out the software to our aging fleet of pc’s. Notice I mention the word ‘aging’
The antivirus package we send out requires 64 mb of RAM and it being sent out to 2700 or so pc’s but 250of those pc’s are win 95 with 32 mb of ram. You can guess what happens next.. We start getting calls for slow pc’s…
Now anyone could have seen this coming…and the recommended solution is throwing out the pc?s and upgrade them.
But the biggest joke of it all is still to come…
Instead of upgrading the pc?s as should happen we are told to remove antivirus from and Internet explorer from those systems on the pretence that those users wouldn’t access the internet and hence wouldn’t get any viruses… WTF?
We are not allowed to spend any money to fix these pc?s? but there is no other option then upgrading or switching to a different antivirus which all costs money..
Other things to note in this story:
– We?ve been pitching for about 3-4 years that the desktops desperately need replacing.
– we were given the go ahead to replace the aging fleet about 4 months ago and then about 2 months into the project and (30-40 pc’s replaced) we get told from management to stop the project. Because it costs money to replace pc’s and we can’t afford costs.
My Gripe:
I work for a company that doesn?t understand that you need to spend some money on your IT to have a working system? instead we are left with 95 type pc?s in 2005 and having to support them at cost after cost when 2000 and above has been proven to reduce costs. Management don?t understand this an instead choose to ignore this and hence later on it will cost them big..
Its 250 pc?s affected this time because of management but next time it could be all 2700 pc?s..
Update:
Management have decided that the next best approach is to roll back to the old antivirus even though it will soon become outdated (month or so from now) and there is no plan to upgrade anytime soon.
Update:
my company posted a rather larger 40+ million for the last 2 quaters…
and i don’t think we’ll ever get use to it.. but a working antivirus solution is one the bases of a good network..