UH acquires anti-virus site license
Note: This story may not be current. It is part of the IT News Archive, and exists as a historical document.
Information Technology is pleased to announce the purchase of a two-year University of Houston System-wide site license for Network Associate's McAfee Total Defense Suite for the Windows, Macintosh and Unix platforms as well as a variety of server security tools. With the increase of people sharing information, attaching documents to e-mail and downloading software, virus protection is an increasingly important issue. Further, over the last few months, the number of new and malicious virus attacks has increased the potential for damage to university systems.
IT is taking a proactive approach to this issue by purchasing the license and making it available free of cost to all students, faculty and staff of the UH System. This license includes all patches and upgrades and covers all new computers purchased as well as home systems. Coverage of home systems was a particularly important issue for the university. "We recognize that a lot of electronic communication occurs between home computers and computers on campus. Not only do students regularly send e-mail to their professors, but faculty and staff routinely work on home computers and correspond with their colleagues, making it advantageous from a security perspective to protect these additional systems, which in turn, protects UH systems," said Jerry Raschke, Manager of Software Services.
The software provides substantial benefits to the university. It enables the university to secure systems by limiting exposure to damaging viruses and provides protection both at the desktop and server levels. In addition to being convenient for users, this decision makes good business sense by reducing support costs. When there is a virus problem, support staff must spend time recovering data and disinfecting systems. It also provides a standard solution for virus problems on campus, enabling support providers at the campuses to more effectively support one product, rather than many different ones.
While other solutions were considered, McAfee was the clear winner. McAfee already has a large installed base in UH System. UH-Downtown has a license with McAfee already in place which is being extended by the agreement. One of the key decision points was an extremely attractive pricing package. Unlike other products, McAfee offers a site license agreement, extremely aggressive pricing for student licenses and a site license agreement (a license for the entire UH System population rather than a fixed number of licenses), a large installed base at the UH System, Unix support, support for enterprise mail servers, and server-based software.
Raschke said "IT is delighted to be able to provide this anti-virus solution to all of the members of the UH System community."
Please visit the UH McAfee site license page for details on availability, distribution and specific information about the software.
If you have any questions, please contact your local support provider or the Information Technology Support Center at 713-743-1411
