Sophos has launched its Virtual Web Appliances, designed to provide complete web protection, a streamlined management experience, and broad deployment flexibility in virtual environments.
The Virtual Appliances are available for download via the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and are designed to be set up in minutes.
According to Sophos, virtualisation has helped organisations reduce capital and operating costs, and drive greater levels of application availability; it has also yielded benefits in flexibility, agility, and control.
Virtualization has helped reduce the number of physical servers used by enterprises, however, the number of virtual servers continues to rise, resulting in increased complexity and server personnel management costs.
This new release is designed to help reduce the complexity of a virtual environment by delivering an industry-first on-premise managed service.Â
Sophos Managed Appliances features free remote monitoring and automated maintenance, automates the update and upgrade process, and provides proactive monitoring and support.
The Sophos Virtual Appliances are designed to streamline the provisioning and management processes with pre-configured performance profiles, built-in load balancing and an intuitive management console. The system is designed to allow users to manage several virtual appliances within a single console, increasing performance and capacity while reducing management time and complexity.Â
The Web Appliance protection has also been combined with the Sophos Endpoint security solution, designed to allow the solution to deliver high-level protection and management visibility into users’ web activity.Â
The system allows administrators to easily set policies, report on activity and protect users beyond the secure perimeter of the corporate network.Â
Sophos provides web protection through its 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.Â
“Organisations are increasingly looking to squeeze more out of less by further leveraging their investment in virtualisation, but simply implementing virtualised 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 virtualisation, but also those of a managed service, all the while keeping their data on-premise and preserving complete control.”
