Sharepoint AntiVirus - Is it needed? 1

[ouzojd]

Hi, all our clients run Trend SMB AV software. We also have trend server protect on our servers and trend's mail scanning running. I know there is a Trend Sharepoint Portal Protect but am not sure whether or not it is required.

With what appears to be just about everything covered with Trend Products is there any possibility (apart from viruses not detected by the current pattern files) of a virus making it to my Sharepoint installation? Is it possible for a virus to infect sharepoint or is running Serverprotect on that server enough (I skip scanning the Sharepoint DB's)? What does a portal antivirus product do that isn't already been done?

Any insight appreciated as I dont want to leave myself open to viruses.

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

If you know that all your clients that are uploading documents to SharePoint has a good antivirus protection on their machines, you might not need the SharePoint Portal Protect.
An ordinary antivirus software running on the clients can't scan the documents that you have in sharepoint, since they are stored in the databases. What a Sharepoint specific antivirus system does is that it also scan the databases and can detect viruses in documents that are stored there.

Even if you have a antivirus software that can scan database files I do not think you can detect any viruses in the sharepoint databases, because the documents are stored as "blobs" in tables in the sharepoint databases.

We are running a SharePoint specific antivirus scanner for our extranet solution of SharePoint, since we can't guarantee that external users have a good and updated antvirus software on their machines. Internally we do not use it, since all our clients have (or at least should have) an updated antivirus software on their machines.

Regards,
Thomas

 

[ouzojd]

Thanks for that, so to clarify your understanding is that it doesn't really provide any protection to the server hosting the database but may stop macro type viruses in office documents from being spread to clients accessing those documents?

 

[Thomas2000]

Hello,

The server itself is not protected (for that you use the regular antivirus software), it will be the content uploaded in sharepoint that will be protected/scanned.

The SharePoint antivirus software will go into the SharePoint databases and scan the content there, it will not do any checks on files outside of sharepoint.

Using an antivrus software for sharepoint will prevent documents infected with a virus to be uploaded/downloaded in/from sharepoint.

Regards,
Thomas

 

[ouzojd]

Thankyou, I appreciate it.