E-mail security vendor MessageLabs is extending its managed services to the Web with its announcement Monday of three services that protect enterprises from threats on the Web.
MessageLabs’ Web Protect comprises three services – anti-virus, anti-spyware, and Web filtering – designed to keep threats from entering a corporate network and to control employees’ Web access, says Brian Czarny, vice president of product management with MessageLabs. The company, which has played in the messaging anti-virus and anti-spam space for years, says more and more threats are originating from intended and unintended Web downloads.
“What you’re starting to see now is this convergence – threats across e-mail, the Web, instant messaging – so we’re really focused on taking the intellectual property and knowledge we’ve developed around e-mail [security] and applying that to the Web,” Czarny says, adding that the company plans to release services for securing instant-messaging communications within the next year.
Of the three areas that the Web services cover – anti-virus, anti-spyware, and Web filtering – MessageLabs says it has gotten the most interest from customers in fighting spyware.
At Perkins Eastman Architects, which employs more than 500 people in seven different offices throughout the country, spyware is a major source of headaches for the IT department, says Michael Gonda, senior systems administrator with the architecture firm. “There was a time when 80% of the phone calls [to the helpdesk] were directly related to spyware, even though the users didn’t know it,” he says. The company is beta testing MessageLabs’ new suite.
The new anti-virus and anti-spyware services protect customers by having their Web traffic flow through MessageLabs’ servers so downloads from the Web can be cleansed of viruses and other malware using heuristics and scanning techniques, says Martin Brown, group product manager of Web services with MessageLabs. With the Web filtering service, a customer’s traffic flows first through MessagLabs’ servers so that pre-defined corporate policies, such as not allowing employees to access auction sites during business hours, can be applied and requests are blocked accordingly, Brown says.
These new Web offerings from MessageLabs compete with products from SurfControl, Websense and others that block malware and control Web access from a company’s desktops, servers, or gateway. But MessageLabs says it’s the only company to offer such protection as a managed service, making set up and on-going administration easier. And that is a key reason why Perkins Eastman Architects is evaluating MessageLabs’ new offerings.
“A lot of our offices are unmanaged, so because there aren’t a lot of hands on the hardware we try to keep our machines as clean as we can,” Gonda says. “Because we have so many machines and no way of physically touching them, the only way to clean up spyware is to send one of our IT people to one of these sites, and that’s not really a good use of our time.” Since the company already uses MessageLabs’ managed e-mail security services, the Web services seem like a natural fit, he says.
The new Web services, available now, are priced at $3 per user per month for one service, $4.50 per user per month for two services, and $6 per user per month for all three services.
The installed base of corporate anti-spyware will grow from 16 million users in 2005 to nearly 541 million users in 2009 — an average annual growth rate of 146%, according to
researchers The Radicati Group.
