There’s No Good Reason to Disable Your Antivirus Software

It's a nightmare scenario for any business when a computer virus cripples their system. It's even worse when it happens to a company that has invested in a dedicated antivirus software, especially when the virus got through because someone felt the need to disable it! Because of scenarios like this, you should never disable your antivirus software.

Data breaches from situations like this often stems from an employee working on a project and getting frustrated because their computer is lagging. Now, we understand how lag can be frustrating, in fact, improving the processing speed of a PC is one service that we offer in order to alleviate such frustration. When an employee takes this lag issue into their own hands, however, a poor decision can sometimes result, like the disabling of their antivirus software.

Why would an employee do such a thing? For many users that do this, it's because they check to see which applications are using the most resources, and upon investigation, sure enough, their antivirus program stands out as a large application draining lots of resources.

Never mind the fact that the employee may have more than a dozen tabs open in their web browser (with half of them streaming media), and they might also have a communications tool such as Skype open, along with their email. In fact, they could have several personal apps running on their workstation, and this would be the true reason that they're experiencing lag. In the mind of an inexperienced PC user, all of these running personal apps are essential, and an application that they cannot see or be entertained by, like an antivirus program, is deemed as expendable in the quest for more processing power.

This "genius" employee will then disable their antivirus software and they may be pleased to see a boost in their PC performance. They will then continue working on their project with their many windows open and pat themselves on the back for improving efficiency. Little do they know, that by turning off their antivirus software, they just put their computer and the entire network at serious risk!

It may appear like the antivirus software isn't doing anything; but, in actuality, it's always working, scanning, updating, and processing the new data that hits your computer. For the times when a user has several apps open at once and they're all pulling data from the web (like the genius employee in our example), this is when the protection of the antivirus will be needed the most! When the antivirus is disabled, a user will lose this constant protection and a virus will be able to infiltrate their system unchecked.

Whether you're looking to get more speed out of a computer, you want to download a specific file that's flagged, or you're just annoyed from seeing popup windows notifying you about antivirus software updates, there's really not any good reason for you to ever disable your antivirus software. You will want to educate your employees of this fact, and you can also enable network controls and permissions to block employees from adjusting the antivirus settings on their workstations.

Your system's antivirus software is one of the most crucial components of your company's network security; you don't want to give anybody and everybody access to its settings. To equip your business with a strong antivirus solution that will stand up to the worst on the web, along with internal neglect, give k_Street Consulting, LLC a call at (202) 640-2737.