Protecting Computers – Centurion Technologies has an approach to protect against spyware, viruses, and other nasty malware
Line56.com | 09/07/05
by Demir Barlas, Line56
Florida State University (FSU) maintains several personal computers and laptops for the use of its student athletes. Wickus Nienaber, a graduate student at FSU, is in charge of related technical support. "I have 500 students that come through the facility in a given semester," he says. "They open and close documents at random, save them to the desktop, print out to our machines, navigate on the Internet."
All this activity renders those FSU competitors vulnerable to the various malware circulating over the Internet. The university's solution was to install a product from Centurion Technologies that serves to protect drives. Nienaber describes the mechanism. "Every time you boot up, it's a fresh system. Their DriveShield creates a scratch area on the hard drive and writes only to that space."
Thus, when Nienaber reboots every morning, each computer is pristine. "Since we've had the systems, there have been no infections," he reports.
Meanwhile, FSU athletes who want to save documents and keep working on them merely bring in their USB drives to do so. But that's not the only way to preserve continuity while working in a Centurion-protected system, because another of the company's products preserves a permanent space on a hard disc. Centurion also lets you centrally push updates through protected computers, meaning that the shield doesn't interfere with normal maintenance and upgrades.
All in all, given how pesky spyware can become (surviving even reinstallations of an operating system), it's an interesting option.