I’m not an IT professional, but I don’t use antivirus software on my personal macs and linux machines- I do regular rotated physical backups, and only install software digitally signed by trusted sources and well reviewed Pirate Bay accounts (that's a joke :-).
My only windows machine is what I would classify as a mission critical hardware connected/control device, an old Windows 8 tablet I use for car diagnostics- I do not connect it to the internet, and never perform updates on it.
I am an academic and use a lot of old multi-million dollar scientific instruments which have old versions of windows controlling them. They work forever if you don't network them, but the first time you do, someone opens up a browser to check their social media, and the entire system will fail quickly.
Yes. In an environment where you have so many clients that they can DDoS the antivirus management server, you have to stagger the update schedule anyway. The way we set it up, sysadmins/help desk/dev deployments updated on day 1, all IT workstations/test deployments updated on day 2, and all workstations/staging/production deployments on day 3.
Probably, implicitly. Have automated regular backups, and don’t let your AV automatically update, or even if it does, don’t log into all your computers simultaneously. If you update/login serially, then the first BSOD would maybe prevent you from doing the same thing on the other (or possibly, send you running to the other to accomplish your task, and BSODing that one too!)
But yeah this is one reason why I don’t have automatic updates enabled for anything, the other major one being that companies just can’t resist screwing with their UIs.
