The logic here is that, when an attack does hit, it can swamp the resources of the actual mail server, so a pre-scanning box can take some of the grunt out of the equation by quarantining anything that even looks suspicious, taking it offline for closer examination without impacting the flow of corporate email.
Sources at the Helsinki-based company, which has traditionally always stuck to a software agenda in its product development, say it doesn’t intend to develop its own hardware, which would be outside the scope of its in-house expertise. Instead it is looking to partner with a dedicated hardware provider for this purpose, preferably a company that is already in a contiguous space, marketing something like anti-spam appliances, to which F-Secure’s AV offering would be complementary and, in a marketing sense, accretive.
The sources said the company is already in talks with a potential partner and close to making an announcement.
