Data Fellows, the Finnish born, San Jose, California-based producer of anti-virus and encryption software, has released the latest version of its network security product F-Secure WorkStation Suite. F-Secure 4.0 combines anti-virus protection with strong encryption for network traffic and stored files, and introduces centralized management capabilities for network administrators to centrally control all security policies.
Mikko Hypponen, research manager at Data Fellows, said that F-Secure 4.0’s policy-based management system, F-Secure Framework, allows the administrator to set security policies on-the-fly and apply them globally or individually without requiring work from the client end. F-Secure can also be used to install security software and software updates remotely onto network client workstations.
Hypponen said the new security suite includes a component that encrypts and decrypts all files, including temporary ones, whenever they are saved or opened. All received files are decrypted and scanned for viruses automatically, a key measure which Hypponen claims avoids missing a virus because it is encrypted. Data Fellows claims that all these additional procedures do not significantly affect performance, adding only a couple of minutes to a working day which might involve the opening and closing of files over two hundred times. However, the company admits that delay might increase on less powerful processors. The software supports all the most commonly used encryption algorithms, including triple-DES and Blowfish and operates in a Microsoft Windows or NT environment.
Data Fellows is a privately held company founded in Finland in 1998. It distributes its products in all the major IT countries worldwide through reseller agreements with companies such as Diamond Technologies and Global Technologies in the US. It has headquarters in San Jose, California and in Finland, and has sales offices in three European locations, including the UK, one in Japan and several in the US. Data Fellows claims its net sales have grown an average of 80% annually over the last ten years and saw revenue of $14.1m in 1997. It has no current plans for an initial public offering.
