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22 Jun 2004

Sophos integrates leading virus detection technology with Blue Coat's next generation web anti-virus appliance

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Lynnfield, MA - Sophos, a world leader in protecting organizations against spam and viruses, today announced full compatibility of its advanced on-access anti-virus scanning engine with the new Blue Coat ProxyAV high-performance web anti-virus appliance.

As part of its partnership with Blue Coat, Sophos has seamlessly integrated its powerful virus detection and disinfection software with Blue Coat's newest ProxyAV appliance, enabling organizations to deploy scalable, high-performance Web anti-virus while meeting the "real-time" requirements of web traffic. The combining of Sophos and Blue Coat technologies provides the robust protection required over web traffic while ensuring fast access to online content without annoying delays while operating a browser.

Powered by Sophos's dependable virus detection engine, the ProxyAV appliance quickly and intelligently processes incoming requested web objects and determines which objects should be scanned for viruses.

Objects that require virus scanning are routed to the Sophos anti-virus engine where virus identification and disinfection occurs before returning the object back to the ProxyAV appliance. The result is low latency/real time content access for the end-user and high-performance security for the administrator.

"Blue Coat's ProxyAV appliance with Sophos's anti-virus technology, provides our customers with a deployable high-performance web anti-virus solution," said Steve Mullaney, vice president of marketing for Blue Coat. "The Blue Coat ProxyAV appliances are sold and supported by Blue Coat, and enable organizations to quickly and easily deploy web anti-virus with the throughput of up to 249 Mbps and with only 4 milliseconds average latency. Users on the network don't even know it has been installed."

With Sophos's virus scanning engine running on the ProxyAV appliance, customers are automatically protected with virus updates via the internet, providing hands-off operation for administrators. Virus signatures are kept up-to-date and are delivered directly from Sophos's worldwide research labs as part of the automatic updating process. Organizations can choose to update either internally from the organization's intranet, or directly from Sophos.

"We are delighted that Blue Coat has selected Sophos's virus detection technology for the ProxyAV to help protect its customers against computer viruses and worms," said Chris Kraft, senior security analyst at Sophos, Inc. "With up to 800 new viruses analyzed each month and the various ways and speed in which they propagate, it is critical that organizations take the appropriate precautions. This integration fulfills the demands of Blue Coat customers that want to deploy powerful virus detection at the web gateway without impacting the 'real-time' performance of web traffic."

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 complete security solutions that are simple to deploy, manage, and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, mobile and network security solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers.

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