AVAST Attacks the Business Antivirus Market with New Product Line

Czech antivirus vendor AVAST Software hopes to take the business market by storm with a new product line called avast! Business Protection that's been in the works for quite some time.

AVAST has had huge success in the consumer antivirus market thanks to its avast! Free Antivirus product which is one of the most complete and reliable free antivirus offerings at the moment.

In the consumer space AVAST is backed by a community of over 131 million active users who provide the company with a lot of telemetry and malware intelligence.

AVAST's success exploded after the release of version 5 of its antivirus engine over two years ago, however, the company's business offering continued to use the old 4.8 line of products.

The AV vendor has since been working hard to revamp its business antivirus product and bring it in line with its consumer one.

The new avast! Business Protection does exactly that and is based on the company's 6.0 antivirus engine released this February.

The vendor hoped to release a new business solution earlier, based on it's 5.0 engine, but work on the new browser-based remote management console took longer than expected.

One of the features avast! Business Protection inherits from the consumer version is the SafeZone virtual environment that give users access to a browser running inside a sandbox.

This feature can prove very valuable to companies that perform online banking, since history has shown that their bank accounts can be abused via sophisticated trojans which evade antivirus detection.

The new business offering comes in two flavors, avast! Business Protection which offers all the anti-malware features and the management console, and avast! Business Protection Plus which adds a firewall and an antispam component.

As with the consumer product, the company has focused on ease of use when developing the business client. "With avast! Business Protection, we are providing the comprehensive network and endpoint security that businesses need in a package that is simple enough for people who are not IT experts to freely operate," said Vince Steckler, CEO of AVAST Software.