Driving back to the office from our datacentre, we took a call from a 4-star London hotel with a major virus outbreak asking if we could help them, since their existing IT support provider was not giving them the help they needed.  We took the call at 15:00 and arrived at the hotel a couple of hours later.  On arrival the hotel systems were shutdown, which was good as it helped to contain the virus and stop it spreading.

We investigated and formulated a plan to contain the infection and clean it from all machines.  The customer’s existing anti-virus software wasn’t able to fully prevent the virus from infecting other machines so we installed our preferred anti-virus software Webroot.  This is a light-weight anti-virus application which can co-exist alongside other anti-virus solutions without problems – it’s what we use to protect all our support clients and has a great track record in preventing infection.  At the same time, we also installed our management and monitoring solution – Autotask Endpoint Management – to give us visibility across each PC and server for disk space, Windows Updates, CPU, memory usage, AV definition updates etc..

Within a few hours every computer had Webroot installed, scanned for viruses and malware, and certified cleaned.  We handed back the systems to the front of house staff at 22:00.  Some subsequent issues were then dealt with as a result of the virus outbreak which required fixing a few user profiles and security policies, and we were able to leave the hotel operational by 01:30.

Some times, in the world of IT, it’s about getting the job done, not looking at the clock wondering when you’ll be able to get home.  If the hotel was our customer, would they have got the virus still?  That’s hard to say as it came in via email, but we do know it wouldn’t have spread beyond the one PC and so would have been contained.  Webroot can cost you as little as £1.50 per machine per month… much cheaper than compensating frustrated hotel guests when they can’t be checked in or use their debit cards to pay for food and beverages.