Sophos Releases New Virtual Email Security Appliance

Today,  IT security and data protection company Sophos announced the availability of its Virtual Email Security Appliance – designed to offer strong security, data protection, and administration ease to the latest VMware virtual environments. This new virtual appliance delivers on the growing popularity of businesses seeking cost savings, responsiveness, scalability, and continuity through virtualization.

As the newest member of the  Sophos Email Security and Data Protection product line, the virtual email appliance brings the same integrated protection and simplified management of Sophos’s hardware appliances to VMWare virtualized environments – providing an integrated solution that combines data loss prevention (DLP) and email encryption with proactive spam and malware protection.

“Businesses are saving considerable time and effort virtualizing parts of their data centers but have been traditionally faced with limited options for comprehensive email security,” said Chris Kraft, Vice President of Product Management at Sophos. “We believe the Sophos Virtual Email Appliance provides organizations with the most complete option for email security, providing reliable protection against all forms of spam and malware while also addressing the latest demands in safeguarding data through our patent-pending SPX encryption and DLP capabilities. All of these capabilities are delivered through our exclusive managed email security appliance platform, which provides full 24x7 monitoring of email traffic and system health. With our offering, we are confident our customers and the market will be able to achieve top security and data protection with less administrative burden, greater peace of mind, and significant savings.”

Benefits of New Sophos Virtual Email Security Appliances

• Rapid provisioning, responsiveness, and change management using pre-configured virtual machine profiles and a standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF)distribution file
• Proactive threat protection via Sophos’s Behavioral Genotype® technology that provides unique anti-malware detection of zero-day threats
• Zero setup, offline accessible data protection with integrated SPX email encryption and DLP utilizing pre-packaged sensitive data intelligence supplied and updated via SophosLabs
• Clutter-free inboxes with Sophos anti-spam technologies such as Sender Genotype and Live in-the-cloud anti-spam lookups that block over 99% of spam
• Automation of most routine maintenance tasks with Sophos’s unique managed appliance experience service that includes automatic updates, monitoring, alerting, and remote remediation if needed
• Improved IT efficiency through a streamlined 3-clicks-to-anywhere task-based administration interface that relies on wizards to make policy and configuration simple
• Complete interoperability and clustering with Sophos’s hardware appliances and other Sophos security products

The new virtual email appliance is one of many Sophos initiatives focused on supporting the virtualized data center and endpoints with additional virtual appliance products slated for later this year.

Both customers and analysts agree that virtualization is much more than a tactical cost-cutting trend. Gartner notes that virtualization is creating a strategic shift in overall IT modernization with virtual machines improving responsiveness and delivery within an enterprise.

According to VMWare, server virtualization allows organizations to be more efficient reducing hardware and operating costs by as much as 50% and energy costs by 80% all while reducing the time it takes to provision new servers by up to 70%.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.