A quality anti-malware software package is absolutely essential to protect your computer, your computer network, and your business. There are a number of products on the market and they range in price from free to moderately expensive. The most expensive packages available are still far less expensive than the cost of decontaminating a machine that has been infected.
We recommend Bitdefender and Avast Cloudcare AV for our corporate clients. This product allows us to monitor your computer for both definition updates and infection notices. Cloudcare AV can be customized for your office environment. The level of protection provided by both of these products is consistently high and we simply do not see many problems with machines that are protected with them.
Any commercial anti-malware product is better than running without protection.
There are also some free products on the market. They don’t tend to be as good as the commercial products and they don’t tend to check for updates as often. It is our position that no business should trust its reputation to free anti-malware software.
Special mention should be made of Microsoft’s free product, Microsoft Security Essentials. We STRONGLY recommend NOT using Microsoft Security Essentials as there are MUCH better products available at a reasonable cost. Third Party tests (eg: the ones by av-test.org), clearly document how poorly MSE compares to other products. We have noted real-world examples of badly compromised machines that were supposedly protected by Microsoft Security Essentials.