Over the last two years, there has been a significant change in approach to the way that mainstream business protection systems are being built and delivered. Across the board, leading protection vendors such as Check Point, McAfee, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro have all been rapidly putting together silos of protection technology in order to present their business customers with enterprise security solutions where all protection components co-exist within the same product set.
The arguments in favor of the approach appear very compelling: enterprise organizations are looking for operational protection solutions rather than security products. The rising number of business users that require day-to-day contact with web-based information services need to be properly protected, and the ever-increasing number of mobile workers that now demand access to corporate systems via the web have an undeniable requirement to make their network connections safely, and without posing a risk to the organization.
In addition, the range/intensity of threats faced by technology users continues to grow, and is more professionally targeted at mainstream communications channels, which definitely includes the evolving sophistication of web threats.
The latest release of OfficeScan from Trend extends the range and focus of the security functions that OfficeScan now has on offer. At the same time, release 8.0 maintains Trend’s longstanding layered protection approach against multiple attack models with its continually evolving anti-virus, anti-spyware, file-based malware, rootkit, and network attack protection services.
The company has further enhanced its existing spyware protection commitments, and has also extended its service protection model to take onboard web threat protection technology. This latest offering attempts to protect corporate end-point users from themselves by ensuring that they are not allowed to access websites that are identified by OfficeScan as being highly likely to deliver some form of malware, but must at the same time avoid generating false positives if it is to be accepted and valued by business users. The technology uses a dynamic form of website evaluation, examining the individual DNS domain reputation and determining its threat potential.
Additionally in this release, Trend has further enhanced the solution with an extensible plug-in architecture that supports the ease with which new functionality and updates can be delivered to authorized users, and has taken the opportunity to announce that OfficeScan 8.0 has recently been awarded Microsoft Vista certification.
Trend Micro has long been positioned as a well-respected provider of core protection solutions that serve the needs of computer users, ranging from the home office market to large enterprise. Release 8.0 sees it extending the functional reach of conventional business protection systems, and it will be interesting to see how quickly its mainstream competitors respond.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
