Rashida Bakait
With the rise in number of online transactions, it is of little wonder that
the focus on matter of security has also been on the rise. In an era of
e-commerce where the success of a business transaction largely depends on
network security, the need to have anti-virus tools that could expedite the
process of cleansing the inbound and outbound mail becomes all the more
necessary.
As a first step in this direction, developers of Mcafee, Network Associates
and their strategic partner in India, Texport Technologies recently came out
with their new anti virus software package, e-50. CNS spoke to Texport
Technologies' Chief Operating Officer, Arun Pathak on the product. Here are some
excerpts:
What is e-50 and what are its features?
e-50 is a product of Mcafee, and the world's first anti-virus appliance. e-50
carries feature such as auto scanning of mails to differentiate between abusive,
non productive and confidential data. e-50 is used only after the firewall is
installed onto the mail server for scanning the SMTP traffic. With viruses
getting more complicated by the day, the size of the anti-virus signature files
is also increasing. As a result anti-virus scanning has become slower, calling
for a need for an anti-virus appliance that would expedite the scanning process.
How different is the product from the existing e-business security tools?
Most anti-virus software available in the market are slow as it calls for
sharing processing resource for the mail server. As a result, the anti-viruses
on the mail server have not been very effective. e50 is an appliance, which does
not utilize the resource of the mail server as it is pre-installed on an
independent hardware and is capable of scanning for 10,000 to 12,000 mails in an
hour. This is almost seven-eight times faster than the normal anti-virus
software that is available in the market. This apart, it also does content
scanning from the mails.
On an average, how many viruses are detected per month and how do they
affect an establishment?
Around 200-250 viruses are developed around the globe, on an average, every
month. Most of them cause damage to establishments in terms of productivity
loss, data corruption and uptime loss etc. Some of the most damaging viruses are
polymorphic viruses, macro viruses, worms, active X and Java applets. Losses
caused by virus havoc last year, was approximately $17.1 billion and this has
been rising every year.
How will this product combat more advanced viruses such as 'Anna
Kournikova' and 'Melissa'?
e50 uses Mcafee anti-virus engine, which is one of the most effective tools.
Mcafee has its virus research labs in six different continents working round the
clock. Network Associates' spending on research alone is around $60 million. e50
is also designed for auto update on any fresh release of a virus counter.
What kind of a market do you envisage for the product?
We would focus our attention on large and medium sized organizations for our
products. e50 is one of the few available integrated world-class anti-virus
products in the market and hence we see a good market for our product. We have
already introduced the e100 series that have preloaded Mcafee on a Sun NetraT1
BOX. This product is targeted at ISP's and large firms.