Keeping Your Network Healthy

Another good reason to keep your entertainment computers separate from your business LAN is that you don't want to be surfing the Web, find a neat program, and download a virus or some other bad program that will start to eat up things in your network. This is yet another reason other people shouldn't be using your business computer to access the Internet. Additionally, if you have children who want to use the Internet, you might want to buy them their own computer and provide a separate Internet connection. The shorthand is like this: Play games on your play computers; do business on your business computers. If at all possible, it's not a bad idea to adopt this policy. With computer prices falling and the fact that many people keep older computers after upgrades, this may be more feasible than ever.

And, of course, because business is business, back up your files on a regular basis. Above all, it's worth the cost to buy a good antivirus software package and keep it updated. The cost is a tax deduction and it will save you a lot of grief if something bad does get loose in your network.

For the safety of your network, a good antivirus program should be used to scan all disks on all computers on your LAN on a very frequent basissuch as nightly when you are asleep. A good antivirus program should also download updates (new virus definitions) frequently. Daily updates are recommended. If you hear of a new virus outbreak, you should immediately check for updates manually.

Keep in mind that if you don't keep your virus definitions up-to-date, then when one gets loose in even a large network, much less a small one, it can wreak havoc as it quickly spreads.

Lastly, a good antivirus program should detect malicious attachments when you are sending and receiving email, and should check removable media (such as a floppy disk) and block you from copying files if the removable media contains a virus or some other threatening program.

Unless your antivirus program was part of a security suite, you might not have anti-spyware software. Make sure you obtain and use two or more anti-spyware programs. Unlike antivirus programs, which can conflict with each other, it's okay to install more than one anti-spyware program.