No, unfortunately we’re not talking about an undiscovered Star Trek movie. (Sorry, Captain).
Next-generation antivirus (Next-Gen Antivirus) is a sophisticated antivirus software that uses artificial intelligence to detect human activity. It identifies coding scripts that attackers use to create viruses. Then, it alerts you to a hostile presence before an attacker has a chance to unleash a virus that will penetrate your defenses.
Sounds great, right? But that still doesn’t answer your question:
Why isn’t traditional AV enough to cover all my cybersecurity bases? 
In short, it comes down to a key difference in the core functionality of both antivirus software options. Next-Gen Antivirus goes a step beyond traditional antivirus software by discovering the root of a cybersecurity threat (the attacker) instead of only warning you about viruses that an attacker has left behind.
Traditional antivirus software isn’t enough to protect your digital assets on it’s own for the simple reason that it doesn’t solve the problem of the attacker. It only solves the problem of the attack.
Now, we want to be clear — we’re not saying that having only Next-Gen Antivirus is enough to protect your business, either. In addition to exchanging your traditional antivirus software for Next-Gen Antivirus, we highly recommend taking the following precautions to patch holes in your cybersecurity framework:
- Check for cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Before you try and solve a problem, it’s important to know what you’re solving. It’s easy to get lost in the lofty world of innovative IT cybersecurity technology, but you may have real security gaps that currently remain unchecked. Here are five signs that help you identify cybersecurity weak spots within your business.
- Conduct dark web scanning. You, your team members and your business may have compromised information in the hands of criminals without your knowledge! To see if your credentials have been compromised in order to prevent fraud, identity theft and a myriad of other harmful crimes, we recommend getting tools for dark web scanning as soon as possible. Our in-depth blog post on dark web scanning shows you how.
- Perform application whitelisting. At its core, application whitelisting prevents any application from being used on your business devices unless it has been approved by your leadership team or IT department. Yes, it can be as frustrating as it sounds when a team member is unable to read a PDF in Adobe Acrobat because no one realized it wasn’t approved. We’ve experienced frustrations like this ourselves! However, hackers often outsmart antivirus software by disguising malware as business applications, so the security benefits provided by application whitelisting far outweigh the inconvenience.
I don’t have Next-Gen Antivirus software for my business. Where do I start?
Here at Varay Managed IT, we use a Next-Gen Antivirus software that we highly recommend for any business looking to upgrade their cybersecurity framework. We’re confident that the proactive attacker-identifying approach of a Next-Gen Antivirus does its part to keep our cybersecurity services in check.
Now, we realize that the task of creating a strong and complete cybersecurity framework is daunting at best. If your business hasn’t implemented Next-Gen Antivirus, we’d love to set you up for success! And if you’re interested in learning what other security components your business is lacking, use our free Cyber Security Assessment to see what other cybersecurity concerns need your attention.
