IT security and data protection company Sophos today announced the availability of Sophos Virtual Web Appliances providing complete web protection, a streamlined management experience and broad deployment flexibility in virtual environments. Available for download via the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, the new Virtual Web Appliances can be set up in minutes, easily bringing the company’s award-winning hardware security capabilities to businesses of any size.
Virtualization has helped organizations reduce capital and operating costs, while driving greater levels of application availability. It has also yielded benefits in flexibility, agility and control. However, even as virtualization has helped reduce the number of physical servers, the number of virtual servers continues to rise, resulting in increased complexity and server personnel management costs.
Making virtualization easier With this new release, Sophos reduces the complexity of a virtual environment by integrating its unique managed appliance experience to deliver an industry-first on-premise managed service. Sophos Managed Appliances include remote monitoring and automated maintenance at no additional charge. This approach combines the benefits of virtualization and on-premise control with the cost savings of a managed service, reducing overhead and complexity. The Sophos Virtual Web Appliance also automates the update and upgrade process and provides proactive monitoring and support — further simplifying network management.
Streamlined provisioning and management The Sophos Virtual Appliances streamline the provisioning and management processes with pre-configured performance profiles, built-in load balancing and an intuitive management console. Users can manage several virtual appliances within a single console, increasing performance and capacity while reducing management time and complexity.
Complete web protection everywhere By integrating web appliance protection with the Sophos Endpoint security solution, the company delivers unmatched protection and management visibility into users’ web activity — wherever they go. Administrators can quickly and easily set policies, report on activity and protect users, even beyond the secure perimeter of the corporate network. This is all possible without the need for costly and complex backhauling or added gateway infrastructure.
Sophos provides industry-leading web protection due to a unique three-stage filter which combines URL reputation filtering, advanced real-time malware scanning with behavioral analysis and content control to guard against the latest threats. Sophos appliances also include advanced capabilities such as HTTPS scanning, dynamic anonymizing proxy blocking and call home detection to cover essential blind-spots.
“With virtualization taking over the modern IT infrastructure, we are excited to have an offer that leverages virtual infrastructures,” said Pete Greco, vice president of sales and technology, Productive Corporation. “Customers are asking for it, Sophos delivers it. A new way to deploy an already great product is an easy sell for us.”
“Organizations are increasingly looking to squeeze more out of less by further leveraging their investment in virtualization, but simply implementing virtualized versions of the same maintenance-heavy applications only helps to a limited extent,” said Chris Kraft, vice president of product management at Sophos. “Our Virtual Web Appliance allows IT departments to not only leverage all the benefits of virtualization, but also those of a managed service, all the while keeping their data on-premise and preserving complete control.”
Trials are available free of charge and licensing is simple, based on a per user, per year basis with no additional charges for the number of virtual servers.