Press Releases

Browse our press release archive

04 Feb 1998

Sophos accelerates MIMEsweeper performance up to thirty times with addition of new anti-virus interface

Integralis Technology and Sophos announce software collaboration.

Sophos, the antivirus vendor, and Integralis Technology Ltd, the content security specialist, have collaborated on technology which will allow MIMEsweeper to scan for viruses at up to thirty times faster than it can with command-line scanners.

The Sophos Anti-Virus Interface (SAVI) is specifically designed to meet the needs of the expanding Firewall, email monitoring and gateway markets. The new technology brings Sophos twelve years of anti-virus expertise to many applications, including web browsers, FTP clients, installation and back-up applications.

"This is one of the most important developments to come out of the anti-virus vendors for some time. On the face of it, it appears to be a simple API direct into the Sophos anti-virus engine, but when you look deeper you see that it is very well thought out," said Andy Harris, technical director at Integralis Technology. "The reliability of this technology in a MIMEsweeper environment is exemplary. It shows that Sophos is one of the few anti-virus vendors that truly understands how to work in pre-emptive multi-tasking systems."

Until now, applications have had to call command-line versions of virus scanners, which need to re-initialise each time a file is virus checked. SAVI's multi-threading DLL-based virus database technology typically increases performance over command-line scanners up to thirty-fold.

"SAVI allows Sophos to integrate fully with other leading-edge vendors, such as Integralis, to provide an all-round security solution," said Peter Lammer, managing director at Sophos. "This is an exciting development which extends Sophos's expertise in virus protection far beyond the conventional desktop and file-server."

Using a single copy of the virus database to process all requests, SAVI eliminates the memory constraints associated with command-line scanners, which reserve memory each time they initialise.

For further details, please contact technical@sophos.com, tel: 01235 559933, read the Sophos product brief Virus Detection in email using SAVI and MIMEsweeper.

About Sophos

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.