REDMOND, Wash. — June 6, 2006 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the release of Microsoft® Antigen e-mail security products — including Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, Antigen Spam Manager and Antigen Enterprise Manager — available to customers July 1, 2006. This milestone marks the first Microsoft-branded release of the enterprise anti-virus and anti-spam products acquired in the 2005 acquisition of Sybari Software Inc.
Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products use multiple scan engines to help provide comprehensive protection from viruses, spam and other security threats. In addition to scan engines from industry-leading security companies AhnLab Inc., Authentium Inc., CA Inc., Kaspersky Lab, MailFilters.com Inc., Norman Data Defense Systems Inc., Sophos Plc and VirusBuster Ltd., all Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products now include the new Microsoft anti-virus engine.
“Customers are faced with the challenge of providing the best possible protection for their e-mail users and maintaining the availability, uptime and performance of this mission-critical application,” said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Security, Access and Solutions Division at Microsoft. “Antigen’s unique multiengine solution integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange Server to provide customers with the benefits of layered protection, while minimizing cost, complexity and impact on performance.”
These new products have completed the Security Development Lifecycle process. Other new feature additions include enhanced signature updates and quarantine management for improved security and log file management, and cluster support for easier administration.
“Server-based security for e-mail and collaborative applications is an important component of a multilayer security model and critical for protecting internal resources and providing threat containment,” said Brian Burke, research analyst at IDC. “Antigen’s proven strength in providing layered, anti-malware protection for e-mail servers addresses the most important customer concern around e-mail security: preserving uptime and availability of Exchange servers. By managing multiple engines, Antigen eliminates daily downtime during updates and provides customers with the opportunity to lower overall risk.”
Microsoft Antigen e-mail security products have already proven to be highly effective in helping customers such as global technology consultants Perot Systems achieve outstanding results in trial implementations. Perot processes nearly 15.5 million e-mail messages per month across its entire production environment, as much as 77 percent of which is spam or malicious in nature. Using Microsoft Antigen, Perot has been able to capture and eliminate nearly all of that unwanted e-mail traffic. Perot has also deployed Antigen in customer environments worldwide, and has benefited from Antigen’s support for multiple scan engines, ease of deployment, rapid signature updates, and centralized, efficient management, significantly upgrading the company’s ability to regulate network traffic for itself and its customers.
“With Antigen, we have a solution that delivers signatures from industry-leading anti-virus labs around the world with a single product that offers complete virus signature coverage,” said Don Westurn, senior Microsoft Exchange engineer at Perot Systems. “We’ve deployed Antigen on many servers in different kinds of environments, and it continues to impress us. In every instance, we’ve had great results; Antigen has been robust, reliable and easy to deploy.”
The following products were announced today:
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Antigen for Exchange provides anti-virus and content filtering for Exchange Server 2003 and 2000, stopping threats that get past perimeter defenses while simultaneously containing internal incidents.
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Antigen for SMTP Gateways provides anti-virus and content filtering for Windows Server™ 2003 and Windows Server 2000 Server SMTP Gateways, stopping threats before they reach internal messaging resources and users.
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Antigen Spam Manager provides anti-spam and content filtering for Windows®-based SMTP and Exchange servers, stopping spam before it can affect user and network productivity.
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Antigen Enterprise Manager provides centralized management for Antigen-protected servers, improving IT administrators’ visibility into and control of e-mail server security.
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Antigen Messaging Security Suite provides comprehensive anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering for Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server e-mail servers and SMTP gateways (includes Antigen for Exchange, Antigen for SMTP Gateways and Antigen Spam Manager).
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Antigen Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. Provides critical events and alerts on virus, worm and spam activity to Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 from Antigen for Exchange Server 2003, Antigen for SMTP Gateways, and Antigen Spam Manager, and monitors the health and availability of these products.
Availability
A free three-month trial license for Antigen e-mail security products is available online. All Antigen products will be available through Microsoft Volume Licensing and the Microsoft industry partner channel on July 1, 2006. This includes Antigen for SharePoint® and Antigen for Instant Messaging, which will remain Sybari-branded products until the next versions, which are targeted for release in the first half of 2007. More information can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/antigen.
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