Kaspersky cloud update in February

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 30 November 2011 10:16

Australians' summer holiday habits are causing a delayed local rollout of Kaspersky's latest cloud security update.

Version 3.2 of Kaspersky's hosted security service will be rolled out to Australian and New Zealand customers in early February, according to Bernie Bengler, the security vendor's director of cloud services and SaaS in the Asia Pacific region.

The European rollout "went extremely well," he told iTWire, but because local companies often have a 'code freeze' in December and January, the new version will be held back here. "I don't expect any hiccups in Australia," said Mr Bengler.

Highlights of the new version include "a complete facelift" for the user interface including simplified reporting and quarantine management, plus a new anti-spam engine.

"We want to keep our portal simple... for instance, spam is spam - there is no 'probable' spam," said Mr Bengler.

Kaspersky has been offering hosted security services in ANZ for around 18 months, and in October last year it opened two data centres in Sydney. Features of the email security service include rapid provisioning (around five minutes), per-user (not per-address) charging, onshore processing, and the quarantining of of spam, malware and phishing emails. "From a CFO perspective, it is a safe investment," said Mr Bengler, as it removes the 70-90% of emails that are unwanted, dramatically reducing the email processing and storage infrastructure required by an organisation.

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