ITWire

This is increasingly important given the widening adoption of BYOD policies among organisations. It might not be practical or desirable to mandate the use of specific security software, but organisations to need to be sure that notebooks used for business purposes are appropriately protected.

It is also a useful facility for consultants, resellers and managed service providers who take care of their small-business customers' computers.

Supported products include those from AVG, BitDefender, Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft (Security Essentials), Norton and VIPRE. Company officials said the feature "supports hundreds of versions of anti-virus software".

Administrators can remotely check that AV software is installed and enabled, check that definitions are current and trigger an update, check and enable real-time protection, check when the computer was last given a full scan and initiate one if necessary, and view log files.

"When we talked to our customers about anti-virus management, it was clear that threat detection and security are critical mandates, but to date, monitoring and managing a mixed environment of anti-virus products has been a cumbersome task," said Matt Kaplan, vice president of products at LogMeIn.

"The new capabilities in LogMeIn Central were designed to centralise and simplify the most common tasks associated with anti-virus management in a way that makes securing hundreds or even thousands of machines under management incredibly efficient."

The new feature is available at no extra charge to existing users.

LogMeIn Central pricing starts at $376 per year. A free trial is available.