Avast shapes up for SMEs with Business Protection 6.0

Czech anti-virus vendor Avast has launched its latest product for the business market, with an emphasis on easy-to-install, lightweight software, improved detection rates and an administration console that enables simple, remote management of corporate machines.

Avast Business Protection and Business Protection Plus 6.0 are based on the same engine used to power the firm's hugely popular free software which is available in over 30 languages and used by more than 127 million people.

The company uses this vast network of endpoints to its advantage by providing what it claims is unparalleled threat intelligence which can be fed back into the products to protect all of its customers, be they businesses or consumers.

Alongside an improved heuristics engine designed to be more efficient at spotting malware, the update offers faster scanning and, for the business market, on-access rootkit detection and boot-time scans to find and remove malware hidden within the OS.

SafeZone, meanwhile, is a separate virtualised desktop environment protected from threats including DNS poisoning and key-loggers, and which system admins can decide who should have access to use.

Time has been taken to reduce the footprint of the software too, and Business Protection takes just 0.75GB of computer space for full installation.

Business Protection Plus has the same features as the regular version of the product plus a 'Silent Firewall' and anti-spam filter, said Avast.

The biggest update for the products, however, is the Administration Console, which V3 saw in April on a tour of Avast's headquarters in Prague.

It effectively brings the functionality of enterprise grade management products to smaller firms, enabling remote administration and automatic detection of any new machines logging onto the network, for example.

Avast chief executive Vince Steckler argued that organisations spend too much time and resources running anti-virus protection and need to concentrate on their core activities.

"The major threat to businesses is a system outage. For whatever reason - technical or operator error - the IT system is shut down, cutting the internal links between employees as well as stopping contact with customers and clients," he told V3.

"The way we combat this is to make the system easy to install and operate. There are millions of people who have installed Avast consumer products successfully - and they are not IT specialists. Our goal was to duplicate this experience as much as possible with Business Protection."