Is it important to deploy a SharePoint-specific anti-virus solution?

Question

I'm looking at the positives and negatives of deploying a SharePoint-specific anti-virus solution at the moment.

Is this important if all the desktop clients are running anti-virus? Will installing SharePoint A/V noticeably impact performance? Are there any other things important to note about this?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Pros

• It is another layer of protection
• and one where you have a single point of contact for management, so a simpler way of protecting Sharepoint than managing AV on all client machines.
• If Sharepoint is going to be facing the internet, you have no control over client machines, so this is the simplest way of protecting your sharepoint against viruses.

Cons

• Potential performance hit on Sharepoint server.
• Possibly it isn't that popular so support may be a bit flaky.
• Is the interface when it blocks an upload/download user friendly, or will it generate support calls?

Considerations

• You probably have management in place to take care of client AV anyway
• Is the Sharepoint server actually at risk from files being uploaded? Is that what you are trying to protect, or merely the spread of a virus via people downloading affected files?

We use Microsoft Forefront IAG to provide access to our Sharepoint Intranet from home users, and managing AV (and detection of it) on non corporate machines is not fun. That is why I am currently considering installing AV on Sharepoint.

Answer 2

If you know that all those who have access to Sharepoint have AV installed, and it will check any files they upload, then its not that important they are checked again on the Sharepoint server. However, can you be absolutely sure that is the case, can users turn off there AV, could there AV miss a file if there uploading a document from say a USB drive?

By implementing AV at the SharePoint server your sure that all files have been checked, and you have complete control over this, rather than relying on users to have it done at there workstations.

Whilst it will obviously decrease performance a little scanning these files, it usually is not a noticeable difference and the slight decrease is worth it for the fact that your server is clean.