ScanSafe to launch in US; aims to block 'Net-borne threats

A U.K. company this week plans to launch its Web security service in the United States, aiming to protect companies from Internet-borne threats much the way e-mail security services block malicious messages.

ScanSafe's service is designed to keep viruses, spyware and other malicious code out of corporate networks by having all of its customers' HTTP inbound and outbound traffic travel through its data center for scanning and filtering. While scouring inbound Web traffic for threats and outbound traffic for policy violations is not new, ScanSafe says it's the first to offer such features as a managed service.

Protecting all PCs on the network, not just those he manages, would be a strong selling point for Mike Irick, assistant IT director at California State University, San Marcos, which is evaluating ScanSafe's service. The university uses an appliance to protect from Web-based threats, but with professors logging on from home and students plugging their PCs into the network, that protection goes only so far, he says.

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A U.K. company this week plans to launch its Web security service in the United States, aiming to protect companies from Internet-borne threats much the way e-mail security services block malicious messages.

ScanSafe's service is designed to keep viruses, spyware and other malicious code out of corporate networks by having all of its customers' HTTP inbound and outbound traffic travel through its data center for scanning and filtering. While scouring inbound Web traffic for threats and outbound traffic for policy violations is not new, ScanSafe says it's the first to offer such features as a managed service.

Protecting all PCs on the network, not just those he manages, would be a strong selling point for Mike Irick, assistant IT director at California State University, San Marcos, which is evaluating ScanSafe's service. The university uses an appliance to protect from Web-based threats, but with professors logging on from home and students plugging their PCs into the network, that protection goes only so far, he says.

The university uses FrontBridge's service for e-mail security and is considering taking that model to Web security with ScanSafe.

"In the e-mail world, services have got scanning e-mail down to get rid of spam and malicious attacks. But the whole other enchilada are the vectors where it comes through the Web," Irick says.

One of the challenges in bringing a security service to the Web is latency, says Dan Nadir, ScanSafe's vice president of product strategy and former executive with FrontBridge, acquired by Microsoft this summer. "What I've discovered is it's hard" to protect HTTP traffic, he says. "Instead of one e-mail at time - at FrontBridge it was a question of how many messages per second can we process - here we might have 100 users clicking on Web sites simultaneously."

The company has developed a network of servers in its data centers that process in a massively parallel manner so that the different elements comprising a Web page are processed at once and sent back to the user. There is no significant affect on response rates, Nadir says.

ScanSafe isn't looking to sell its service directly to corporations, but through channel partners, particularly those companies that offer e-mail security services and want to add Web security to their portfolio, Nadir says. MessageLabs, for example, launched a Web protection service last month that resells ScanSafe's services, he says.

ScanSafe, which was formed in the U.K. in 2004 and has 900 clients in Europe, competes with McAfee, Barracuda Networks, Blue Coat Systems and Trend Micro. Nadir says the company's hosted service model will give it an advantage. While some corporations back off from letting another company host its e-mail, he says most will be comfortable sending Web traffic through a security service.

"People don't have the same hang-ups about processing Web traffic for security and privacy as they do with e-mail," Nadir says.

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