Sophos announces all-in-on virtual email appliance

IT security and data protection company, Sophos, has announced the availability of its Virtual Email Security Appliance, bringing strong security, data protection and administration ease to the latest VMware virtual environments. It delivers on the growing popularity of businesses looking for cost savings, responsiveness, scalability and continuity through virtualisation, from a trusted brand in the industry.

The new virtual email appliance incorporates Sophos’s integrated protection and simplified management, and provides a solution that combines data loss prevention (DLP) and email encryption with proactive spam and malware protection.

Benefits of the Virtual Email Security Appliances include:

1. Rapid provisioning, responsiveness and change management using pre-configured virtual machine profiles and a standard Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) distribution file;
2. Proactive threat protection via Sophos’ Behavioral Genotype technology that provides anti-malware detection of zero-day threats;
3. Zero setup, offline accessible data protection with integrated SPX email encryption and DLP using pre-packaged sensitive data intelligence supplied and updated via SophosLabs;
4. Clutter-free inboxes with Sophos anti-spam technologies, such as Sender Genotype and Live in-the-cloud anti-spam lookups that block over 99% of spam;
5. Automation of most routine maintenance tasks with Sophos managed appliance service that includes automatic updates, monitoring, alerting, and remote remediation if needed;
6. Improved IT efficiency through a streamlined 3-clicks-to-anywhere task-based administration interface that relies on wizards to make policy and configuration simple; and
7. Complete interoperability and clustering with Sophos’s hardware appliances and other Sophos security products

The new virtual email appliance is one of many Sophos initiatives focused on supporting virtualised data centres and endpoints with additional virtual appliance products slated for later this year.

“Sophos customers as well as analysts, such as Gartner, agree that virtualisation is much more than a tactical cost-cutting trend,” says Brett Myroff, CEO of regional Sophos distributor, Sophos South Africa. Gartner notes that virtualisation is creating a strategic shift in overall IT modernisation, with virtual machines improving responsiveness and delivery within an enterprise 10, 20, or even 30 times faster than traditional hardware and software server solutions.

According to VMWare, server virtualisation allows organisations to be more efficient, reducing hardware and operating costs by as much as 50% and energy costs by 80%. All while reducing the time it takes to provision new servers by up to 70%.

“Businesses are saving considerable time and effort virtualising parts of their data centres but have been traditionally faced with limited options for comprehensive email security. We believe the Sophos Virtual Email Appliance provides organisations with the most complete option for email security, providing reliable protection against all forms of spam and malware while also addressing the latest demands in safeguarding data through our SPX encryption and DLP capabilities,” Myroff says.

“All of these capabilities are delivered through our managed email security appliance platform, which provides 24×7 monitoring of email traffic and system health. The new offering will give our customers and the market data protection with less administrative burden, greater peace of mind and significant savings.”

Existing Sophos Email Security Appliance customers can tap into the latest offering using their existing email appliance licence.