Trend Micro Revises Data Loss Shields for SMB

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P>Trend Micro today announced Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 for small businesses, an update to its data loss prevention software designed to protect user data from being sent out without authorization.

The Cupertino, Calif. company also introduced Worry-Free SecureSite, a hosted service that scans an e-commerce Web site daily for newly found vulnerabilities.

Many of the new features in Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 are cloud-based and delivered as a service instead of an on-premises installation, and it’s the second IT-oriented SaaS (define) product after its SecureCloud
product. Trend said it’s necessary these days.

“A lot of protection and the updates to that protection are moving into the cloud,” John Clay, product marketing manager for SMB products at Trend told InternetNews.com.

“The traditional anti-virus solution is you find a problem and send a signature out. That design takes up a lot of overhead on the machine, and the threats are coming so fast you can’t keep up. Now, when we have a solution, it’s immediate and instantaneous protection for all of our customers.”

There are two versions of Worry-Free, standard and advanced editions. The difference between the two is the advanced version includes Microsoft Exchange mail protection. Customers can have their incoming e-mail routed through a scanning service provided by Trend to scrub it for questionable e-mail before it is sent on to their own servers.

Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 has specific functionality for the SMB market, as opposed to taking an enterprise-scale product and dumbing it down, an all-too-common criticism of SMB products. Customers with large-scale enterprises should stick with Trend’s LeakProof product instead.

Among the new features is protection of Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU) QuickBooks files, since many SMBs run on QuickBooks. The QuickBooks “folder lockdown”
feature will protect QuickBooks users from data or identity theft, so attempts to steal the data files will be blocked.

The theme of 5.0, according to Clay, is safer, smarter and simpler. The safety comes from the addition of protection via Trend Micro’s Web reputation database, so customers will be alerted before going to a known malicious site. The smarter part comes from the e-mail scanning in the cloud before it ever hits the customer’s servers, and the simpler part comes from a single console to manage all of Worry-Free’s services.

“A lot of customers have complained about security apps adding too much overhead,” said Clay. “So the design we tried to do is add new protection without increasing requirements. With hosted technologies in the cloud, we can offer that much more effectively than in the past.”

Separately, Worry-Free SecureSite is designed to check your e-commerce site daily for a number of threat vulnerabilities that they could be leaving their site open to attack, like cross-site scripting or SQL injection. Site managers then get a report with the vulnerabilities it found and instructions on how to fix it.

Jay Zelek, IT manager of FPSmith, a farm and heavy equipment supply company, said his firm has used Worry-Free since 1999 with no problems.
“What I like about it particularly, is this new version is very easy to customize in certain ways,” he told InternetNews.com. “It runs silently on each of our computers and no one knows it’s there, which in my opinion is a good piece of software.”

This article was first published on InternetNews.com.