VP sales for the company Harnish Patel said the launch today of SurfControl’s new managed service offerings of WebDefense and MailControl, which use the on-demand technology bought in with BlackSpider, stands as a big milestone in the transformation of the filterware company.
Over the past 14 months the company has undergone a massive shake-up of its operations to get back on track, and to broaden its portfolio so it can offer layered security options in the three form factors of software, hardware appliance, or managed service.
Patel said the on-demand area is growing fast, and suggested that the market share of security delivered as a managed service looks likely to ramp from 20% today to a 40% slice within the next four years. He said it is an area in which the company can now compete.
The business has been investing in the necessary infrastructure, and is said to be rolling out new data centers to be able to analyze email and web threats in real time, providing protection against zero-day attacks. Two data centers in the US are operational with firm plans for two more already commissioned, and by the end of the year others will be opened to cover the Asia Pacific region to add to those already in place across Europe.
All mail passing through the data centers is screened using the Huntsman technology, with added heuristic scanning tools that will carry out behavioral analysis of enterprise emails and attachments to identify and block new viruses, porn, and unsolicited spam email. Patel said the centers handle some 24 million messages a day and run a filter database of 18 million URLs.
The company will now sell on-demand web and email protection, offer on-network gateway protection with web and email software alongside a risk filter appliance, as well as its desktop and mobile filtering and ThreatShield end point product.
