VIPRE Security has launched VIPRE Endpoint Security - Cloud Edition. It's a key step in a bigger cloud-based security services strategy for channel partners. At the same time, the company released the results of a survey that, perhaps unsurprisingly, backup the necessity for such a solution.
For the study, the company surveyed 250 SMB IT managers, according to Usman Choudhary, chief product officer & senior VP R&D at VIPRE.
Among the key research findings: 23 percent of SMBs report they experience cyberattacks daily. Now, this can range from nefarious malware attacks like Wannacry to those threats more easily spotted like the infamous Nigerian Prince scam. Still, Choudhary says he was surprised by the frequency of the attacks.
“The users are experiencing any and all of it, especially the SMBs,” he says. Amid the heightened attacks, SMBs need to move beyond basic anti-virus and free anti-malware offerings.
Goodbye Data, Goodbye Business?
Without advanced security in place, many SMBs risk going dark. Indeed, 66 percent of IT professionals surveyed indicated they would either go out of business or shut down for a day if their systems or data were compromised. Notably, going out of business and losing income from a day-long outage are quite different. Choudhary says this has a lot to do with the size of the business, focus, clientele, defensive posture and more.
“If the attack is widespread it’s going to be a disruption to the business,” he asserts. “The challenge is that larger companies have more reserves, more redundant systems, more depth, and defense. The midmarket and smaller businesses don’t have the deep pockets and some of that resiliency.”
Finally, 68 percent of IT managers said it’s their job to generate security reports in order to show management the company is protected, while 47 percent indicated they have to manually collect that data from various sources and only 41 percent have access to an online security dashboard.
“They have to spend all this time between configuration data, the health of the system, and the actual threat, and they don’t have a dashboard,” Chowdhury says.
Safeguarding SMBs
With the aim of addressing these issues, the new VIPRE Endpoint Security - Cloud Edition is the first piece in a larger puzzle that the company is assembling. By gradually introducing more and more cloud-based services, the company is striving to ease channel partner adoption adoption and customer consumption.
In a way, the strategy isn't all that surprising since most modern IT security services are available on-demand via the cloud. But VIPRE's focus on simplicity, advanced machine learnin and real-time behavior analysis could be differentiators.
VIPRE Endpoint Security - Cloud Edition is designed to protect customers against ransomware, zero-day attacks, phishing, exploit kits, mobile threats and other malware that tend to evade traditional antivirus solutionsm the company says.
“We’re not the first generation of cloud-based endpoint security,” he says. “But the early vendors just literally took the on-premises solution and put it into the cloud. It’s like a hosted solution.”
In contrast, VIPRE's solution includes a dynamic dashboard that tracks current environment status, including infected vs. uninfected scans, the severity of threats found, top 10 infected machines, threats found and threat categories and more, the company said.
“We had that advantage of not being the first and then looking at where people didn’t do well, especially the SMB market,” he adds. “So we tried to do something different.”
