Taking an innovative approach to the now traditional methods of delivering security for Windows computers, Panda Security has made available for download the final version of its free Cloud-based antivirus offering. Panda Cloud Antivirus is a free security offering designed to integrate seamlessly with Windows 7, but also with its predecessors, including Windows Vista and Windows XP. When it comes down to Windows 7 and Vista, support is available for both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) flavors of the two platforms, while only x86 XP is supported.

Panda Security launched the first Beta development milestone of Panda Cloud Antivirus in April 2009. At that time the security solution did not provide support for Windows 7, which itself was still approximately half a year away from commercial availability. Only with the Beta 3 phase released in October was Panda Cloud Antivirus tailored to the latest iteration of Windows.

“Since the beta release of Panda Cloud Antivirus in April, we have been judiciously testing our cloud-based protection model, making upgrades in security and performance, and listening to our user community,” noted Juan Santana, CEO of Panda Security. “With Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.0, we’ve really changed the game, providing our users the most powerful and lightweight free protection available on the market today.”

Panda Cloud Antivirus is a combination of a lightweight client installed locally on Windows 7 machines, and Cloud-based technology. Specifically, the antivirus takes advantage of the Collective Intelligence, an advanced system designed to harvest and centralize information on malicious codes in the wild from the community of Panda users. Collective Intelligence uses as sources both the local detection technologies provided by the security product, but also a real-time cloud-scanning. By leveraging the Cloud rather than anchoring the security solution exclusively on premise, Panda Cloud Antivirus is capable of minimalizing the impact on the system resources. In fact, the promise from the security outfit is that the performance of Panda Cloud Antivirus has been optimized through cache tweaks and memory management capabilities designed to cut CPU utilization as well as memory consumption.

Panda Cloud Antivirus is available for download here.