– Panda Cloud Antivirus emerges from beta, offering consumers free protection with industry’s smallest footprint on PC performance

– Panda Cloud Protection offers SMBs hosted security service subscription for endpoint and email protection

 

Panda Security, the Cloud Security Company, today unveiled the next generation of its cloud-based anti-malware services for home users and small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs): Panda Cloud Antivirus and Panda Cloud Protection. Emerging from beta today, Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.0 is the industry’s first, free thin-client anti-virus for consumers, now featuring an even lighter footprint on PC performance. Panda Cloud Protection is a fully hosted, managed security service for SMBs, which provides hands-off protection of endpoints and email. Both security services leverage Panda’s proven Collective Intelligence cloud-scanning system, which guarantees both SMB and home users with the industry’s fastest protection against the newest and most dangerous malware.

“In the cloud and security as a service have the potential for cost savings and for fast deployment, as compared with equivalent-capacity, premises-based equipment,” according to Gartner’s recent Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection 2009 report.

Cloud-Based Protection for Consumers

Since its successful beta launch in April 2009, Panda Cloud Antivirus has received acclaim from industry experts and consumers for being the lightest free anti-malware service in the world. As it emerges out of beta, Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.0 offers improved protection against new and unknown viruses with even less impact on users’ PCs. Cloud Antivirus 1.0 provides 100 percent cloud-based protection against malware, spyware, rootkits and viruses. Panda Cloud Antivirus works with Windows XP (32bits), Windows Vista (32bits & 64 bits) and Windows 7 (32bits & 64 bits) operating systems and only consumes 20 MB of RAM. It is available in 11 languages and can be downloaded from http://www.cloudantivirus.com.

Cloud-Based Protection for SMBs and their Managed Service Providers

Today’s security software solutions are too costly and difficult to manage for the vast majority of small and medium-sized businesses. Panda Cloud Protection is an incredibly lightweight managed security service that automates all maintenance tasks and allows SMBs to stay focused on their core business, while resting easy about safeguarding their digital assets and information. As a hosted service, Panda Cloud Protection optimizes resource consumption and eliminates the need for any investment in IT infrastructure. SMBs can benefit from a fully-outsourced security service, enabling them to easily monitor and maintain their own protection against malware from anywhere, anytime, or assign responsibility to a managed service provider (MSP).

In addition, by linking to the same Collective Intelligence servers used by Panda Cloud Antivirus, SMB users will benefit from Panda’s vast global knowledgebase of malware which detects and blocks new strains from the cloud in almost real-time. “For the last 20 years Panda Security has successfully safeguarded our customers’ digital information and identities through creating some of the world’s most innovative security solutions,” said Juan Santana, CEO for Panda Security. “The launch of Panda Cloud Protection and Panda Cloud Antivirus represents an evolutionary step in our ability to combat cybercrime, and one we’re confident the industry will follow. Panda’s new and improved security services leverage our extensive R&D in cloud computing to keep our SMB and home users protected with as little effort and investment as possible.”

Collective Intelligence

Collective Intelligence, Panda Security’s proprietary cloud-computing technology, leverages the knowledge gathered from the community of millions of Panda users around the world to provide unparalleled proactive malware protection with minimal impact on PC bandwidth. The Collective Intelligence servers automatically detect, correlate and respond to more than 50,000 new malware samples every day. Each new file received is classified automatically within six minutes, a process that takes other antivirus products to complete in days.

Availability and Pricing

For more information on Panda Cloud Antivirus, visit http://www.cloudantivirus.com.

For more information on Panda Cloud Protection, visit http://cloudprotection.pandasecurity.com.