Trend Micro announces safer, smarter and simpler next-generation Worry-Free security for small businesses

Trend Micro Incorporated (TSE: 4704), a global leader in Internet content security, announced today a major new release of the company's Worry-Free Security solutions that tackles the changing needs of small businesses and the evolving Web threat landscape they face.

Worry-Free Business Security 5.0, the next generation of the flagship Trend Micro Worry-Free Security that was first introduced to the small business market over four years ago, is designed to be:

Safer -Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 includes Trend Micro Web threat protection technology, which provides a multi-layered defense against multiple Web threats that take advantage of the interactive nature of the Internet. Web threat protection uses Trend Micro's Web reputation database that contains the threat experiences of all our customers worldwide - from consumers to enterprises. Each attack on an individual PC adds to the Trend Micro database and understanding of Web site reputation, malware behaviour, and spam sources. (Trend Micro scans about 3-4 billion Web sites and prevents 8-10 million customer exposures to infected sites on a daily basis.) Subsequent users are then protected from these threats and their sources.

With this type of comprehensive, collaborative, "Neighbourhood Watch" type of real-time protection that stops threats (including spam) before they can enter into a network, growing businesses are able to keep their business assets safe, thereby protecting their reputation.

Smarter - Traditional anti-virus solutions, because of their deployed location within a network and the conventional threat-detection method used, are reactive and often cause computer and network performance slowdowns. Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 includes Trend Micro's hosted technology, such as Web threat protection and hosted solutions such as InterScan Messaging Hosted Security (which integrates anti-spam, anti-phishing, anti-virus and anti-spyware) that do their work and block threats "in the cloud," taking up less bandwidth space and requiring no configuration. Meantime, Trend Micro software on the computer monitors the behaviour of applications (versus relying purely upon signature pattern files) for suspicious activity. This, in combination with hosted technology, is more effective at stopping new Web threats and consumes fewer resources.

Simpler - Easy to use and deploy, Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 will be able to be managed by channel resellers via a single console, Worry-Free Remote Manager. This can remove administrative burden for solution partners' direct customers of Worry-Free Business Security 5.0. Worry-Free Business Security also automatically increases security for out-of-office employees.

Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 includes:

Advanced: Protects Microsoft Exchange/Small Business Servers, Microsoft Windows servers, PCs and laptops.
Standard: Protects Microsoft Windows servers, PCs, and laptops.

For many small businesses, the Web is a must-have resource to remain competitive. Businesses of all sizes are seeing a rise in mobile workers, telecommuters and travelling employees. Small businesses generally do not have the luxury of a full IT staff to counter the mounting number, types and complexity of Web threats. Trend Micro threat analytics show the growth in severe malware infections, such as viruses and Trojans, grew 200% throughout 2007, infecting more than one in eight PCs scanned. As a result, small businesses now need solutions that resolve more grievous, highly consequential issues such as identity theft, loss of critical digital assets and damage to their company's reputation.

Worry Free Business Security 5.0 addresses many of these issues with new features:

Location awareness automatically changes Worry-Free security settings on notebooks of employees who are inside or outside the office, providing both flexibility and security for employees whether in or out of office.

Multi-layer spam blocking stops spam before it reaches networks so that spam doesn't take up network bandwidth or disk space. And because spam is stopped early on, it never reaches the Exchange server, thus reducing sluggish performance.

Application behaviour monitoring monitors the behaviour of applications on computers versus relying purely upon signature pattern detection. This consumes fewer resources and requires less maintenance.

Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 is the first security solution to provide specific protection against data corruption and identity theft of critical accounting information stored within QuickBooks data, the leading accounting package for small businesses. Protection for QuickBooks users is available in both the Standard and Advanced versions of Worry-Free Business Security 5.0. For the full press release that describes this feature, please visit http://trendmicro.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=633.

"Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 shows that Trend Micro understands the needs of our market - they've given us some really good enhancements and added features, and the solution is very economical in terms of the resources it requires," said Jeff Herr, director of IT for JC Produce.

"Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 inherits the solid foundation upon which Worry-Free Security was built upon over four years ago: all-in-one integrated defense, automatic threat protection with minimal administrative requirements," said Steve Quane, executive general manager, SMB business unit, Trend Micro. "Our current and future customers can continue to count on this, as well as benefit from the newest arsenal of technology we've included in Worry-Free Business Security 5.0 that is designed for a new generation of small businesses that is more mobile, Web-dependent and facing profligate cyber-crimes."