Introducing

Aperio is a software audit product developed by Anthony Data Systems. Since staff given the responsibility of carrying out software audits often have no experience in this field, and sometimes have only limited IT experience. The emphasis is therefore on simplicity and ease of deployment.

Aperio employs a sophisticated software recognition system far beyond the traditional file name & size matching technique. This not only gives accurate results, but allows changes to the software library to continue working even when a new version of a product is discovered.

Aperio uses lower-overhead UDP rather than TCP when possible, and even TCP transfers are more efficient than file copy operations used by the shared folder technique. Overall impact on the network is negligible.

Audit products whose scanners run as fast high-priority tasks risk momentarily freezing the target PC and annoying users. The thrashing hard drive also makes the scan very obvious – more technical users may investigate using the task manager and shut down the scanner, less technical users may simply phone IT Support, concerned that they may have a virus.

Aperio scans are carried out as low-priority background tasks, allowing users to continue their work uninterrupted. An irregular scan frequency is employed; so many users may think the scan is just normal Windows disk activity.

Because of their background operation Aperio scans take longer than some other products – possibly over 10 minutes for PCs with large, full hard drives. However, this is considered preferable to numerous support calls resulting from unexplained intense disk activity, or unresponsive PCs.