Here is an excerpt from the Panda press release describing Panda Cloud Protection:

“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).”

You can get more details on Panda Cloud Protection from this white paper.

In addition to the Panda Cloud Protection offering for SMB’s, Panda Security also unveiled Panda Cloud Antivirus–a free service to provide protection for consumer systems. Here is what Panda says about Panda Cloud Antivirus:

“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.”

Large enterprises have the personnel and the budget necessary to dedicate the appropriate resources for security. Small and medium businesses have the same security needs, but lack the resources.

Cloud-based, or security-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, like Panda Managed Office Protection enable customers to implement and maintain the protection they need in an efficient and cost-effective manner. SaaS subscription fees are affordable and predictable and remove the need for the customer to deploy and maintain the server infrastructure necessary for managing security.

Delivering security from the cloud makes sense on a number of levels. Engaging a security-as-a-service provider rather than dedicating internal resources makes even more sense. SaaS enables customers to provide enterprise-class endpoint security on an SMB budget and allows them to focus their resources on their core business with the peace of mind that security is under control.

One option for SMB’s is to basically outsource the maintenance of the security infrastructure while retaining administrative control over the actual implementation of security. Companies contract outside resources for a variety of services from janitorial duties to physical security of office facilities. Why not contract network security as well?

The evolution of the Internet has given rise to the concept of “cloud computing”. Put simply, cloud computing means that the software is centrally located and managed somewhere out there on the Internet, affectionately known as the cloud.

Panda Security offers Panda Managed Office Protection which basically provides a cloud-based, managed security infrastructure that lets Panda handle the expense and the grunt work of keeping the servers online and up to date, while enabling customers to manage security policies and administer the implementation of security through a web-based console.

I had an opportunity to test out PMOP and I was pretty impressed. There are two things in particular that really stand out in my opinion: peer-to-peer updating, and Collective Intelligence scanning.

Administrators can configure the endpoints to acquire updates from other endpoints on the network in a peer-to-peer framework rather than having every client update from a single source or bogging down the available network bandwidth by having all of the endpoints download the updates directly from Panda. For SMB’s with a limited bandwidth pipeline to the Internet this feature can ensure that security updates don’t cripple the network.

With Collective Intelligence the majority of the malware scanning is done in the cloud on the Collective Intelligence servers. That reduces the resource consumption and performance impact on the endpoint systems, and also provides virtually limitless resources to analyze malware samples and develop signatures on the fly.

I think PMOP may be just what many SMB’s are looking for. PMOP is a sort of hybrid solution between a locally installed enterprise security solution and a fully managed security service. It provides a cost-effective solution for SMB’s to get enterprise-class security without relinquishing complete control of security to a third-party.