Trend Micro wants to give small and midsized businesses something less to worry about when it comes to Web and data security.
The company released today version 5.0 of its Worry-Free Business
Security software as well as a new service called Worry-Free SecureSite with an
eye towards helping SMBs deal with a more sophisticated Web threat landscape.
“We added what we call our Web Threat Protection components
into (Worry Free 5.0), where if an end user is browsing a Web site and we
determine that its a malicious site and then we’re going to block it, we use
our in-the-cloud technology to block that site,” said John Clay, product
manager of SMB products for Trend Micro. “Because we’re doing all the computing
in the cloud, we don’t require any signatures or any updates to rule sets on
the endpoint itself, it’s all done through in-the-cloud technology.”
Moving some of Worry-Free’s components into the cloud
continues with Trend Micro’s increasingly Web-based approach to delivering
security. With Worry-Free, Trend has also added a new layer of email protection
for users by bundling in its InterScan Messaging Hosted Security service. What
that means, Clay said, is that customers can re-direct their email to Trend,
which will sanitize it before sending it on to the customer.
“It protects them in the cloud…so they don’t have to deal
with processing a lot of these additional, spam emails on their (Microsoft)
Exchange servers, nor do they have to archive or add more storage space and
capacity because they’ve got so much spam to deal with as well,” he explained.
The company has also built in location-awareness technology
that automatically changes Worry-Free security settings on laptops depending on
whether employees are inside or outside the office.
“(Administrators) can set up that rule set to be a little
less forgiving when they are off the network, plus the Web threat protection
works whether they are on or off the network,” Clay said. “So if I am a mobile
user and I’m checking in from the hotel and browsing the Internet, I’m still
protected because that technology is built into the cloud.”
Worry-Free SecureSite meanwhile comes at Web security from a
different angle, focusing on eCommerce operations. The service works to protect
online shoppers from data theft, notifying Web site operators for example when
their sites are vulnerable to attacks such as SQL injection or cross-site
scripting and advice on how to remediate the situation.
Despite the Web focus, not all of the new protections in
Worry-Free 5.0 are in the cloud. The company has added application behavioral
blocking into Worry-Free 5.0 as well as a feature for Intuit QuickBooks that
locks down QuickBooks files in the hard drive directory to increase users’
protection against identity theft and data corruption.
Pushing some capabilities into the cloud however does have
its advantages, Clay said.
“(Software-as-a-service) is just a method of delivering
something…but it still requires an agent to be installed, it’s just the
administration and all that is done up in the cloud,” he said. “But I think
from the standpoint of does a small, medium business customer benefit from
software-as-a-service - absolutely.”
Hello this is Brian Prince
at eWeek. Does a SaaS approach to security appeal to your business?
