Trend Micro announced today the industry's first hypervisor "agnostic," virtualization-aware endpoint security offering: Trend Micro OfficeScan 10.5, the company's endpoint security solution for medium businesses and enterprises.

Growth of VDI leads to new security challenges

According to a recent study by the Enterprise Strategy Group, 60 percent of enterprises have a desktop virtualization strategy and 45 percent of them will have virtualized 50 percent of their desktops within the next three years.¹ But despite the smaller economic impact of cleaning or rebuilding infected virtual endpoints, most usage scenarios of virtual desktops have a risk profile nearly identical to that of physical desktops.

The temptation for enterprises is to deploy their existing non-virtualization-aware endpoint security to their virtualized endpoints. Doing so poses significant performance challenges on the shared VDI server hardware, leaving end users negatively impacted. In the end, enterprises are forced to choose between poor VDI Return on Investment (ROI) or poor security along with potential lack of regulatory compliance.

The VDI optimizations introduced in this new release of OfficeScan address these key challenges: Integrating with Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View, OfficeScan 10.5 identifies virtualized endpoints and prevents resource contention by serializing scan operations and security updates, avoiding so-called "AV-storms" and the "9:00-AM problem."

OfficeScan 10.5 enables customers to maximize the number of virtualized desktops per host, contributing to a higher ROI of a customer's VDI investment without lowering security standards. Additional optimizations leverage VDI provisioning concepts such as base images and linked clones to further reduce the performance impact of security on the VDI environment and support an improved user experience.

"With the upcoming release of OfficeScan with VDI-aware technology, Trend Micro reconfirms its commitment to and leadership in virtualization security," said Steve Quane, Chief Product Officer, Trend Micro. "With OfficeScan 10.5, customers can realize the full benefits of desktop virtualization. It also meets the new challenges our customers are facing and uniquely delivers comprehensive protection for both physical and virtual desktops from a single management console."

What's new in OfficeScan 10.5

• NEW VDI-awareness compatible with Citrix XenDesktop and VMware View: Conventional endpoint security solutions cause significant performance overhead on shared VDI hardware resources, causing end-user frustration and compelling enterprises to lower their security standards. OfficeScan 10.5 prevents resource contention and optimizes scan operations on virtualized desktops to maximize the number of VMs per VDI host – whether the enterprise is using Citrix or VMware – without sacrificing security or regulatory compliance.
• NEW Windows® 7 optimized: OfficeScan 10.5 provides advanced, cloud-powered endpoint protection that's compatible with Windows 7. Its future-proof plug-in architecture and small footprint enables enterprises to extend and make the most out of their Windows 7 investment.
• NEW Local Web reputation: In this latest version of OfficeScan, customers have the option to implement Web-reputation on a local, customer network-based server, delivering even faster protection, improving end users' Web-surfing experience, and saving money by offloading the corporate Internet connection. Web reputation and file reputation, both components of the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network infrastructure, provide immediate, real-time protection against the latest threats - so customers don't have to wait for the next update. Independent testing from NSS Labs shows that Trend Micro OfficeScan provides the #1 rated corporate endpoint protection.
• Streamlined management and better scalability: OfficeScan 10.5 now allows for more than 20,000 endpoints to be managed from one single OfficeScan Management Server. This industry-first capability enables Trend Micro customers to manage both their physical and virtual desktops from a single management console. In addition, customers can consolidate their OfficeScan installation and further streamline the management of clients.

North American Pricing & Availability

Trend Micro OfficeScan 10.5 is expected to be available in late July 2010. Pricing varies by seat count and decreases by volume. For the 1,001-level seat count, OfficeScan 10.5 is US$20 per user and US$8 per user for VDI-aware capability.

Trend Micro OfficeScan is part of Trend Micro™ Enterprise Security – a tightly integrated offering of content security products, services and solutions which is powered by the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network™. Trend Micro Enterprise Security delivers maximum protection from emerging threats while minimizing the cost and complexity of security management.