How To Protect Your Network's PCs: Page 7 of 13

"We're waiting for a spyware solution with a strong management solution," says Gene Fredriksen, vice president of information security at Raymond James, a financial services company. "I can't afford to manage 15,000 separate instances of a product. I need a good control panel."

In addition to management concerns, no anti-spyware tool has proven to be 100 percent effective in identifying all the spyware on PCs. Like the early days of anti-virus, IT administrators often find themselves turning to multiple products to detect all instances of unwanted programs.

HIPS: OH BEHAVE

HIPSs are drawing interest from enterprises for two reasons. First, they provide real-time protection against attacks. By contrast, signature detection is reactive, meaning the attack has to appear before vendors can create a signature to detect it, and enterprises have to wait for those vendors to distribute the signature before they can start blocking the attack.

Second, HIPSs provide coverage for endpoints that haven't been patched. Because a HIPS can block both known and unknown exploits, administrators can test and deploy software fixes during regular maintenance windows instead of during emergencies.