SCS * IT Solutions for Business

We have worked hard to find the best 'tools for the job' with regards to firewall protection for in house operations to stay secure but have the advanced filtering, quality of service and redundancy options that can be flexible and grow with your business which we believe we have found with our very strong partner ZyXEL in their ZyWALL series of firewalls and Prestige line of routers with advanced firewall and VPN features.

SCS have worked with ZyXEL for over 6 years and we have previously had requirements for the firmware engineers to make changes due to issues or requirements that our customers have had which not all manufactures will do but we feel privileged that this partner has such respect for us to do this. We will of course, consult, supply, install and support the firewalls and routers and offer a competitive price structure to buy outright or provide rental options, the rental option comes with advanced replacements standard too which some support companies will charge up to £250 for each replacement.

Many of our dedicated firewalls come with options to have website filtering (to restrict some users or computers from certain sites), content filtering (similar to websites but this can block specific content across all or some of the internet), Intrusion Detection Prevention which is critical if your business deals with financial transactions of any type as you will need this to pass certain UK standards of practice and also Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus features.

Alongside the firewall VPN capabilities SCS have several customers that have requirements for having VPNs set Up with their server or another system as their VPN 'endpoint' either for security reasons or functionally purposes. SCS can help with this and are happy to support most existing or new methods of connectivity from remote locations/devices.

Unsolicited bulk emails (otherwise known as Spam) can be a real problem for companies, taking up a lot of time and effort sifting through email.

Many email solutions (such as Google Apps and many Hosted Exchange solutions) have an in-built anti-spam system, but what if you have your own mail server - or even a cluster of mail servers?

Or perhaps you need a better anti-spam solution that offers a Service Level Agreement.

Perhaps you just want to take the load off your existing servers which are spending too much time processing the growing volumes of spam.

A hosted anti-spam solution could be the answer. We offer multiple solutions in this area.

Benefits include:

• Excellent level of anti-spam cover. Depending on the solution this could be backed by a service level agreement covering the false-positive rate.
• The option of holding spam in a quarantine so you can check what's been caught.
• Less load on your own server(s) as they don't have to handle the spam.
• Protection from attacks. Your mail systems are configured only to accept email from the hosted spam filter only. Any email-based attacks will be sent towards the filtering service, not to you.

The renound Postini service (owned by Google) is one of the hosted anti-spam services we offer.

For a long time now an anti-virus solution has been essential for any business.  What has changed dramatically, however, is the range and focus of the treats an average computer might encounter.   Anti-virus software now has to provide protection against all kinds of malware, not just traditional viruses.  Worms, trojans, phishing attacks - these all need to be covered.

For more information on types of malware and online malware scanners, see our Resources section.

An effective approach is to have the company firewall inclorporate anti-virus protection, to stop infections before they reach the network (see Firewalls and VPNs).  However this is not always practical, and will not protect against infection via a USB stick or other removable media.  So there is still a need for software.

Whilst no anti-virus product is totally infallible, all products are not created equal.  SCS has chosen ESET as our primary anti-virus solutions provider.  ESET's NOD32 software has been around for some years now and has repeatedly proven itself to be among the very top performers and is consistently at or near the top in independent tests and reviews.

From ESET:

Stopping Internet threats getting in the way of your Internet experience: ESET NOD32 Antivirus 5 protects you at the highest level while you work, social network away, or play online games. The 5th generation of ESET NOD32 Antivirus packs enhanced detection technology and security features straight out of ESET development labs for the protection you can rely on.

One of the reasons we like ESET products is the ability to administer them remotely, including fine-graned control over configurations and features.

Some more information about ESET products:

Selected Features: