OREANDA-NEWS. December 20, 2011. Small and medium-sized enterprises can find it difficult to fully understand and quickly respond to the latest IT security threats in today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape. As business needs change, operations can become more complex, and this in turn can affect IT security. To help channel partners support smaller firms in addressing the security implications of trends such as consumerization, increased use of mobile devices and social media, cloud computing, and virtualization, Kaspersky Lab is launching a new edition of Kaspersky Hosted Security, its cloud-based security solution for web and email.

Malware and viruses represent the number one IT security headache for businesses of all sizes and across all sectors, closely followed by spam and phishing attacks. More than 70,000 unique malware samples are identified every day by Kaspersky Lab’s experts. Protecting business against such web and email-borne threats is a major challenge, particularly for smaller firms that typically do not have the relevant IT expertise or resources in place. A cloud-based solution such as Kaspersky Hosted Security represents an ideal option for these firms as it requires no investment in IT infrastructure or equipment, no specialist security skills, and can be easily scaled up or down to meet changing business needs.

For channel partners the upgraded Kaspersky Hosted Security represents a cost-effective solution with a strong business preposition that is easy to sell, configure, and support. With a service level agreement guaranteed by Kaspersky Lab, it provides a low-risk platform for added-value services and consultancy such as additional gateway, server and endpoint protection.

“We are delighted to launch this new version of Kaspersky Hosted Security to address a growing business need,” said Ilijana Vavan, Senior Vice President Corporate Sales Europe at Kaspersky Lab. “As the threat landscape continues to grow, smaller firms are as vulnerable and exposed as their larger counterparts, but often lack the budgets and capability to explore and invest in expensive security. The new edition of Kaspersky Hosted Security has been completely re-built to offer small and mid-sized businesses and their trusted channel partners a powerful first line of defense in web and email protection.”

Kaspersky Hosted Security comprises two modules: Kaspersky Hosted Email Security and Kaspersky Hosted Web Security.

Kaspersky Hosted Email Security reliably and continuously protects businesses against email-borne malware, spam and phishing emails by blocking attacks in the cloud with minimal impact on IT equipment and end users. It ensures business continuity should company servers fail and protects against mail server overload. The solution prevents potentially destructive Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and Directory Harvest Attacks (DHA), and allows businesses to enforce email security policies through the use of attachment handling. Email data is protected and legally compliant at all times and is processed at one of Kaspersky Lab’s highly secure, certified data locations in Europe.

Kaspersky Hosted Web Security combines web security and web filtering in a single service, protecting the corporate network against web-borne threats such as malware and spyware. It offers companies a platform to control inbound and outbound web communications and to enforce proper employee use of the Internet. It protects against undesirable or dangerous web content, optimizes network resources by removing bandwidth congestion, protects remote and roaming workers, and creates comprehensive reports.