With Windows Vista scheduled for business availability via volume licensing come November 30, Sophos - a provider of integrated threat management solutions - has revealed support for Microsoft's latest operating system. Addressing the corporate environment Sophos Anti-Virus version 6.5 has been upgraded to deliver compatibility for Vista, in addition to Windows 2000, XP and 2003.

Here are a few features integrated in Sophos Anti-Virus 6.5:

- Protection against viruses, spyware, adware and PUAs
- Application control, which allows businesses to set their own policies regarding whether user groups are allowed to run software such as IM clients, VoIP, peer-to-peer file sharing and distributed computing projects
- Behavioral Genotype Protection to guard against unknown threats
- High performance scanning with Decision Caching
- Central management and update features, using Enterprise Console
- Automatic updates against the latest threats every 10 minutes

Additionally, Sophos revealed that the current customers, deploying version 6.0 of its anti-virus solution will be updated to support Vista automatically.

"While other security vendors aren't happy with how Vista has implemented its increased security, Sophos has been working closely with Microsoft and fully supports new functionality, such as Kernel Patch Protection (also known as PatchGuard)" said Richard Jacobs, CTO at Sophos. "Sophos Anti-Virus running on Vista provides unprecedented protection."