Georgian Bancorp. Inc. of Atlanta said it has almost completely eliminated computer viruses from its data network by using a gateway product and that it plans to expand its use.
Marc McGrath, the information security officer at Georgian Bank, said the $2.1 billion-asset company has not experienced an infection on the 300 desktop computers and servers on its network since September, when it installed an Mi5 Webgate appliance from Mi5 Networks Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif.
"The tools we used in the past were decent, but we wanted a centralized solution that we could manage for our entire enterprise," Mr. McGrath said in an interview last week. This year the company has had only four or five computer infections, he said.
Georgian, which specializes in offering business banking and private banking services, had been using separate products for its firewall, virus protection, spyware, and other threats, with many of the products installed on each user's desktop.
The Webgate appliance operates at the network level rather than individual desktops and guards against a wider range of data threats, Mr. McGrath said.
Georgian's next step is to convert its URL filtering to the appliance to prevent employee access to unauthorized Web sites, he said.
Doug Camplejohn, Mi5's chief executive, said most malware now comes from corrupted Web sites.
His company licenses virus-definition libraries and uses proprietary algorithms to prevent "botnet" infiltration, he said. "Those things are changing so fast that a blacklist will miss 90% of the things that are out there."
