I'm considering a NAS hard drive for my home network, but I'm unclear about what protects my data. Can I rely on the router firewall and the protected PCs?
John Palmer
It's a good question and this is a neglected area. At the moment, I suspect most people rely on the firewall in their router, and use the PC's antivirus software to scan external hard drives. This should be safe enough but doesn't provide real-time protection. Symantec is selling SAV for NAS (Symantec Anti-Virus for Network Attached Storage), but it's not altogether clear how this helps. Storage servers, which run their own operating system, should also be able to run their own antivirus software. A very small example is a Windows Home Server, but this is a much more expensive type of storage.
