Antivirus Requirements and Best Practices for CIC and Subsystem Servers

The following information provides the requirements and best practices regarding antivirus software products for CIC and its subsystem servers. These subsystem servers include Interaction Media Server, Interaction Media Streaming Server, Interaction SIP Proxy, and others.

Follow these practices and requirements when you install and use an antivirus software product on servers for CIC or its subsystems to ensure maximum performance and processing capacity:

Genesys provides documentation for configuring the supported antivirus software products for use with CIC servers. To view the documentation, on the Genesys Testlab site, click the Data & System Protection hyperlink.

Install only a supported antivirus product

Genesys selects and tests different antivirus software products from multiple vendors based on the popularity of the product in customer environments. Genesys tests each antivirus software product on several criteria, such as performance impact, compatibility, and processing capacity. Genesys then validates specific antivirus software products for use with CIC and its subsystem servers.

To view the supported antivirus software product

1. Open a web browser to the Genesys Testlab site.

2. Select the Data and System Protection hyperlink. The supported antivirus products, the associated versions, and any impacts on performance and capacities for CIC and its subsystem servers appears.

Install only the virus protection security feature

Many software security products and suites include features in addition to virus protection. For performance and capacity considerations, CIC and its subsystem servers do not support any third-party security features other than virus protection. Many of these security features require the installation of drivers that can introduce decreases in performance and capacity, such as resets of network interface adapters.

The following list provides some of the unsupported security features that software security suite products can install:

• Firewall

• Malware protection

• Spyware protection

• Intrusion prevention

• Network monitoring

Configure real-time protection for only write operations

Most antivirus software products provide a real-time protection feature, which scans for viruses when a program or process attempts a read, write, modify, or run operation on a file. The terminology for this type of feature varies between antivirus software products, such as On-Access Scanning and Auto-Protect. For more information about configuring the real-time protection feature of your antivirus software product, see the documentation for that product to determine its terminology for that feature.

Server software products run and read files frequently. By default, most antivirus software products use the real-time protection feature to scan files on read, write, modify, and run operations. Such a configuration can significantly reduce input and output performance of the storage media, create file lock contention, and cause a reduction in processing capacities of the host server.

Exclude continually accessed file types and directories

To process the interactions in your organization, CIC and its subsystem servers must write and modify files on a rapid, continual basis, such as recordings and log files. To ensure the maximum performance, configure your antivirus software product to exclude specific file types and directories, as presented in the following sections.

Files and file types to exclude

Configure your antivirus software product to exclude the following files and file name extensions:

.i3p	.dxs	.i3pub
.i3c	.db	.ininlog (CIC log file format)
.ivp	.ihd	.ininlog_idx (CIC log index file format)

Directories and subdirectories to exclude

Configure your antivirus software product to exclude the following directories and all subdirectories:

• Directory that contains the Interaction Media Streaming Server log files.

  The directory containing log files is set through a PureConnect installation program. If Interaction Media Streaming Server is the only PureConnect product installed on this computer, you set the directory in the Logging File Path box when you installed Interaction Media Streaming Server.

• Directory specified in the Temporary directory box on the Config-General page of the Interaction Media Streaming Server web interface.

• Directory specified in the HTTP client cache directory box on the Config-Audio page of the Interaction Media Streaming Server web interface.

Update virus definitions daily

Genesys strongly recommends that you configure your antivirus software product to download and implement new virus definitions daily. Schedule these updates to occur during off-peak hours. For more information about virus definitions, see the documentation for your antivirus software product.

Conduct a full scan of the file system regularly

Genesys strongly recommends that you configure your antivirus software product to scan the file system of the host server storage media on a daily or weekly basis. Schedule this scan to occur during off-peak hours. Ensure that you select a time for starting the scan that allows it to finish before demand on host server resources increases.

Some antivirus products use separate exclusion lists for real-time protection and full system scans. Ensure that you define the files and directories specified in "Exclude continually accessed file types and directories" in Antivirus Requirements and Best Practices for CIC and Subsystem Servers.