Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the state of New Mexico. NNMC operates two campuses, one located in Espanola and another in El Rito. 3,200 students and 200 staff depend on the school’s network of 700 workstations and 13 servers for effective management and operation. For the past eight years, the responsibility for maintaining the availability of the network has fallen to Patricia Borrego, Director of Management and Information Systems for NNMC.

The extent and importance of the network to the operation of the school means that a low-maintenance, high reliability security solution is high on Borrego’s list of priorities.

“What’s important to me about network security is that the solutions I deploy need to work reliably, not drain staff or computing resources, and not break the bank,” she says. “My team needs to focus its time on strategic projects and proactively developing new applications, not fixing the after-effects of a virus infection.”

Re-evaluating virus protection requirements

As a matter of course, Borrego periodically reviews the choice of security protection to ensure the school continues to get the most cost-effective solution available.

“We had been using Norton for some while,” she recalled. “While we were not experiencing any particular problems with it, I do like to review the alternatives. This time around, I compared Norton, McAfee, Trend Micro and AVG as possible providers.”

Borrego finally chose AVG Anti-Virus Network Edition for three key reasons:

First, AVG was highly recommended by one of the school’s instructors who had used the software and was extremely impressed with the price-performance ratio.

Second, she found Walling Data, an Authorized Distributor for AVG that specialized in working with educational institutions. Borrego liked the generous educational discounts and the purchasing flexibility that allowed her to buy the exact number of licenses she needed over time, rather than having to purchase everything up front or ‘round up’, as many suppliers do, resulting in unnecessary extra expense.

“Walling Data’s flexibility was ideal for our situation, as we wanted to start out with just 200 licenses of AVG to make sure we were making the right decision for the school as a whole,” Borrego recalled.

Third, the proof of the pudding was in the eating. After deploying the first 200 licenses of AVG and seeing how well it performed, Borrego and her team decided to make AVG the school’s preferred security solution moving forward.

“AVG proved to be easier to install and manage than Norton,” said Borrego. “In fact, it has been such a good match for our needs that we have never needed to call for support. AVG installs with no problem. It runs with no problem. It updates with no problem. So it solves my problem.”

A Special Kind of Support

Since Borrego had never experienced any problems with installing or managing AVG, she was barely aware of the free and unlimited US-based support Walling Data provides to all its customers. When it came time to plan for the upgrade to the latest version of AVG Anti-Virus Network Edition, version 8.0, earlier this year, she discovered just how helpful Walling Data’s Product Support Team could be.

“I was trying to reach the help desk just to have them answer a few questions about 8.0 and for some reason I just couldn’t get through on the phone,” Borrego said. “So I emailed my query to Walling and, within minutes, a support team member responded with the information I needed. It turns out I was dialing the wrong number! The support team answered all my questions and went out of their way to help.”

Walling Data’s responsiveness and deep knowledge of both the product and the particular issues for educational institutions left a lasting impression on her.

“I have to tell you, I was very pleasantly surprised that they got back to me so quickly. I can’t imagine getting that level of responsiveness and personal service from the ‘big name’ vendors,” she said.

Walling Data is the longest-standing and highest-volume distributor of AVG Technologies solutions in North America. For more information about how to purchase AVG Anti-Virus, resellers and end users should visit http://www.avg-antivirus.net.

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About Walling Data

Founded in 1994, North Carolina based Walling Data is a value-added distributor of technology products and solution for resellers, small businesses, education and government institutions. Walling Data was the nation’s first distributor of AVG Anti-Virus and Internet Security products and today is the highest-volume distributor for the product in North America, with more than 75,000 satisfied customers. Walling is also the only value-added distributor for Cymphonix Network Composer, an award-winning device that helps companies control and monitor users compliance with internet usage policies. Walling Data provides no-cost, unlimited U.S.-based phone and “we-do-it-for-you” remote support for all of its customers. For more information, visit www.wallingdata.com or call 866-833-5727.

About AVG

Founded in 1991 and with offices in the US and Europe, AVG is a leading international developer of Internet threat protection solutions for consumers and SMBs. AVG is one of the fastest growing companies in the industry with more than 80 million active users around the world. The company employs some of the world’s leading experts in Internet security, specifically in the areas of threat research, analysis and detection. AVG’s award-winning products are distributed globally through resellers and over the Internet as well as via third parties through Software Developer’s Kits (SDK).

I been using the Internet for a long time now, so long I don’€™t even remember when was the first I ever used it. But back then there was a lot less hassle of having protection on our PCs and not only that! You also didn’t have to worry about having your very own identity stolen!

Today’s world is totally different, there are hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet that would love to steal your credit card, bank details, paypal account you name it they want it!

But it’s not just that they also want to take your identity to ruin your credit by taking out massive loans in your name and having it paid in to your account for them to just withdraw it from there PC…

It does not stop there either, not only are we scared to wits of losing our cash but we also have people wanting to destroy our data on our computers out of pure fun and joy… It’s a sad world we live in.

Now I’m not here to scare you, don’t close that Internet connection just yet as I do also have some great tips and ideas on how to keep your self protected from such worries.

Firstly, every computer must own a Firewall, but I can hear the slow ticking in your head already banging away and asking… What’s a Firewall?

Firewalls are designed to prevent other computers accessing your computer without your permission, to keep this very basic, a firewall is basically wall between you and the Internet. For others to get pass this wall they have to be given permission from the users on the other side.

Firewalls are great protection; I have used many, ZoneAlarm, Norton and also McAffee. But the best I have seen so far would have to be from Panda Software. They have a two in one package having Antivirus and Firewall all in one box. Though this may stop people from trying to attack your PC using software etc there are still many other routes that you can get attacked.

Viruses, Spyware, Trojans are just a few names that are currently taking advantage of thousands of PCs around the world; a firewall will not protect you from all of these!

Instead, you are going to need an Antivirus product which will take care of most of these threats.

Most Antivirus software will protect you from almost all threats on the Internet, you don’t need Spyware protection for Spyware, Trojan protection for Trojans… You get the picture?

One single Antivirus application will do all the work for you, don’t sit there searching endless searches for different products to help you out… Why?

In the end you will have loads of junk software on your PC all taking up system resources and wasting your computers CPU power. You will start to see your PC running slower and in the end you will just have to do a recovery of the entire system because it will be too naked to even start up… Phew!

But you get the picture now; a single application is all you need, the big brand names do all this for you at the moment, it runs in your task bar and does almost everything except make you a nice cold tea! Just make sure you install the latest Antivirus software soon as your Operating System is installed… We don’t want anything bad slipping through do we!

To keep your self safe from all the nasty stuff on the Internet then the only best advice I can give you is to stay away from them bad nasty adult sites and also stay away from FREE software sites… These type of sites are hard to pick from, some are bad… Some are good.

Keep your software up to date and watch where you go and you should have no problems at all.