Comodo’s endpoint solution is relatively new to the market, but has posted strong adoption rates and has just been added to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

Security vendor Comodo has enhanced its Comodo Advanced Endpoint Protection [AEP] solution, with the highlight being the adding of Linux support for the first time, and significantly improving its support for Macs.

Comodo is a long-established security player, which started in the U.K. in 1998 and moved its head office to New Jersey in 2004. Their background is in SSL certificates, and they are the world’s largest certificate authority. Their endpoint security solution is much newer however, being only a year old. It has, however, done extremely well since its inception.

“It already has 85 million users worldwide, which is three per cent of the world’s AV market,” said Ed Greene, Comodo’s VP of Sales. “While being only one year old it is already 13 to 14 per cent of Comodo’s business. We are posting 300 per cent plus sales increases, and I anticipate that accelerating before it decelerates.” Just this week, Gartner adding them to their Endpoint Protection Platform Magic Quadrant.

“As the most recent entry into the AV space, we have the advantage of having a different and newer architecture,” Greene continued. “We are able to make default-deny security work with our OS virtualization technology. Malware is an unknown executable when it enters, and others allow things to run until they figure out if its bad or good. Only a couple of competitors don’t let you run that. We have so much automation that we can take an unknown executable, put it in Secure Auto-Containment until we have a verdict, and get a verdict within 45 seconds. This prevents unknown items from having free access until they are assessed, while doing the assessments quickly.”

Greene said that Comodo has been able to do this because it invests massively in innovation.

“Our company is now about 1200 people strong, and of those, about 800 are developers,” he said. “We are constantly innovating new products. We have a patent attorney in each of our national offices.

Comodo’s sweet spot is in the SMB space, which they define as under 1000 seats, and their go-to-market has always had a strong channel component.

“The channel is in our DNA,” Greene said. “We have had strong partnerships from the beginning and about 80 per cent of our business is channel. Most of the direct business is U.S. large enterprises. For MSPs we offer a free ITSM package with remote monitoring, remote access, patch management – everything an admin would want to run their endpoint. For MSSPs we have Comodo One, a full RMM and PSA integrated platform, with full quoting. Both of these are no charge. So we can help a reseller become an MSP or MSSP for free.”

The new announcement extends full default-deny endpoint security to Mac OS X and Linux platforms.

“This is all about creating feature parity with Windows,” Greene stated. “With both Mac and Linux, we can now do everything that we can for a Windows machine.”

The Linux support is entirely new, while the Mac support has been enhanced.

“We were able to manage and monitor Macs before,” Greene said. “The enhancement is that now we have them as part of the management console, so they can be updated through Active Directory, rather than have to be manually loaded.”

In addition to the expanded platform support, the new version of Comodo AEP adds several other new features.

It now enables auto-containment of fileless malware that can affect system memory without leaving a file “fingerprint” that can be detected. Granular security is provided for command line parsers or executors, such as Windows commands, Python and PERL scripts.

Improved management features include stronger automated management to run scripts on devices and remote desktops remotely, as well as new remote access tools for troubleshooting devices. Monitoring and alert thresholds to generate notifications have also been improved.

External device control now detects any and controls every device and port, to disable functionality, lock down USB and enable exceptions based on device IDs.

The new Comodo AEP product is available immediately, The Linux support is not immediate however. It is scheduled for release in the first half of 2017.