Trend Micro Launches Broad Virus-Protection Strategy

The company's Enterprise Protection Strategy includes a service to help companies protect their networks before virus fixes are available and also a damage-assessment and cleanup service.

Trend also will release a new version of its centralized management software, Control Manager 2.1, to manage and monitor the whole outbreak cycle, from prevention policies to cleanup activities.

The Enterprise Protection Strategy is the result of meetings with 125 customers worldwide after last year's destructive Nimda and Code Red worms, said Steve Quane, product group manager for enterprise services at Trend.

"Nimda and Code Red were a big wake-up call for us," he said. "Those were brutal. We said, 'There's got to be a different way of dealing with this.' "

The Tokyo-based company, which has U.S. headquarters here, learned that customers scramble to protect their systems before a pattern file is released to combat a virus, he said. Customers have to rely on a hodgepodge of threat information and spend a lot of time manually locking up systems, he said.

"We asked them, 'How much assistance do you get from our industry?' They said 'little.' . . . They felt the [antivirus industry was leaving them hanging," Quane said.

Trend's Outbreak Prevention Services provides customers with policy templates that they can use to block attacks until a pattern file is released. For example, if a virus comes in an e-mail with a specific header, a policy can be implemented to block that e-mail, he said.

Companies also had an onerous time cleaning up systems after an outbreak, and some continued to be plagued by old viruses such as Melissa, Quane said. "They had a hard time getting an assessment of their whole environment and where they were affected," he said.

Trend's software helps enterprises identify which systems were infected and provide templates that rid them of virus remnants, he said.

The new services provide the company's solution providers with installation and consulting opportunities, he said. The initial services are geared toward large enterprises, but the vendor likely will release a scaled-down version for SMBs within the next year, he added.

All of the services and products are slated to be available in June.