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Blackburn Rovers Community Trust is a regional centre of excellence providing learning in a non-traditional setting, using its association with football as a route to other knowledge, skills and understanding. From dedicated facilities at the Blackburn Rovers’ stadium, the trust’s complement of qualified teachers and assistants, supply a range of curriculum focussed projects, serving over 500 schools and colleges throughout the North West of England.

The trust’s resources include an IT network of 170 client PCs, managed by five servers, one of which is an Exchange 2003 machine. Chris Dawes is responsible for maintenance and availability of these facilities. One of his main concerns recently has been the increasing risk of malicious hacking attempts that are known to target corporate networks.

“Although anti-virus software was installed as part of the initial set-up, and has been in place for a few years, we were never really confident that it was fulfilling the purpose originally intended. Initially we set out to find the best course of action to improve the system” explains Chris Dawes.
“Following the decision to make a change, I consulted our IT supplier and carried out some research myself, from trade publications and comparative reviews published on the Internet.”

“BitDefender was shortlisted and subsequently selected to provide a replacement security suite. A key deciding factor was the additional tools available for network management, enabling us to assign WMI scripts to systems and groups that will run specific tasks. This offered far greater potential for use in the future and it was really more than just a virus solution.”
“I can run the inventory of a machine, enable or disable remote access, obtain/request reports on running processes, restart or shutdown selected processes. I can also run or remove software remotely and more by using BitDefender.”

“The procedures are Wizard driven making it very easy to use. You don’t have to be highly technical skilled to administer the network. An important advantage over our previous installation was the introduction of a management console providing complete control over the network and every client.
“As well as being easier to use, the BitDefender Security Suite is certainly fulfilling its purpose.

“We found a number of Trojan and hijacker viruses while conducting an initial scan of the network before installing the software. While this had not led to a disruption of the service, their presence could have a cumulative effect in slowing the network performance.”

“Another feature distinguishing BitDefender is the smooth integration with the Active Directory. This manages our users, groups and computer names, so when I have an overview of the network in BitDefender, it is a complete mirror of my Active Directory so I have complete visibility over all my areas of responsibility.”

Chris Dawes concludes by saying: “We heard about BitDefender initially as it was providing the spam agent for the Trust’s e-mail management service. This was generating a large number of updates, so we could see that BitDefender is on top of the game as far as that was concerned.”