One of our big PWAN customers had a virus problem over the weekend. For those of you who don’t know a Private Wide Area Network is basically a secure corporate network run over public networks such as ADSL and leased lines.

It took the customer most of the weekend to identify the source of the problem which came from a rogue PC at one site. What Timico was able to do was to shut off access to that site from all the others. This allowed the other sites to contiunue functioning and prevented the virus from spreading.

The virus was eventually identified as one that had not been covered in the customer’s security software virus definition package.

It did take some time to fix but all’s well that ends well. There is a lesson to be learnt here though. This was quite a big customer with almost 100 sites in their network but they would almost certainly have benefitted from a network security audit. It could have saved them several man days worth of effort over the weekend and probably kept the IT manager’s hair from going grey.