Users want zero-hour virus protection

We have just concluded a major study on messaging security - and will publish the results shortly - in which we asked organizations about the desirability of zero-hour virus protection.

Zero-hour capabilities can protect an organization from viruses, worms and Trojan horses before anti-virus vendors have had an opportunity to create a signature to defeat the new threat and provide it to their customers. This is an increasingly important capability given the ability for these threats to propagate very quickly and given that it can take five hours (sometimes much longer) for organizations to have new signatures in place to defend against them.

When we asked organizations to rate the importance of zero-hour virus protection, 47% of the 115 respondents indicated that this capability was “important,” while another 30% indicated that it was “extremely important.” Not surprisingly, the vast majority of respondents would seek to purchase these capabilities from their current anti-virus vendors. However, well over half of respondents indicated that they would look to their current anti-spam vendors to purchase these capabilities. Although seven out of 10 respondents feel that zero-hour virus protection should be integrated with anti-virus systems, one in five feels that it really doesn’t matter if these capabilities are integrated with anti-virus systems, indicating that companies other than pure-play anti-virus providers have an opportunity to provide these capabilities as an adjunct to existing security systems.

Zero-hour virus protection is a relatively new area for many vendors and potential customers, and about 40% of respondents were not familiar with vendors that are offering these capabilities. We anticipate that this will change rapidly as zero-hour virus protection becomes more widely marketed.

The bottom line is that zero-hour virus protection is a critical necessity given the vulnerability that organizations face between the outbreak of a new virus and its cure - these capabilities should be very high on the “must-do” list for organizations of all sizes.

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