Answer
GMS Anti-Virus offers many advantages over the Virus Scanner Manager. Just a few of them are listed below:
| VSM | GMS Anti-Virus | ||
| Licensing | Customers need to purchase a separate, multi-user license to operate VSM with GMS. This may require negotiation with the virus scanner vendor. | GMS Anti-Virus is fully licensed. | |
| Throughput performance | VSM is single threaded – so on a busy system, email messages must be queued up and delayed while the virus scanner attends to them. | GMS Anti-Virus is multi-threaded – so on a busy system, all messages will be processed concurrently so reducing the delay to any one customer. | |
| System load | VSM requires an executable to be started multiple times to scan each part of an incoming message. Starting executables is a very expensive and resource intensive process. | GMS Anti-Virus is operated via a .DLL or .so library file. It is only loaded once per system start and therefore dramatically reduces the resources required. Microsoft quote a factor of 4 to 10 times improvement in performance for this solution. | |
| Cleaning | Not possible with VSM. | Where possible, GMS Anti-Virus can remove viruses from attachments and then allow the original, un-infected file to pass through the system to the user. | |
| Identification | Not possible with VSM. | When the name of a virus is known, this information can be provided to the administrator and/or user so that they know a virus was found. | |
| Maintenance | Each time the virus scanner vendor updates or changes the way their program works, GMS will need to be updated to cope with the new command line arguments and log file output. NOTE: Gordano is unable to help you in this task. | GMS Anti-Virus is fully integrated into GMS so the customer need do nothing when new scanning engines are introduced. | |
| Updates | Each virus scanner vendor has a different method for updating the signature files. This may involve punching a hole through a security fire wall – thus introducing another potential source of attack. | All updates to GMS Anti-Virus are carried out by email which has a signature check at each end to ensure that no tampering has taken place. For more details, please call sales. | |
| GMS Webmail | No scanning on file attachment. | All files attached by users are scanned and rejected before they are attached to email messages. This ensures that no emails with viruses are sent through or out of an organisation. |
See Also:
- Why is VSM no longer available?
- Why is it better to use GMS Anti-Virus rather than a third party anti-virus solution?
- If I use GMS Anti-Virus, how quickly can I expect to be protected against a new virus?
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