VIPRE Endpoint Security - Cloud Edition, is a built for the cloud solution, not its server product ported into the cloud.

SMB-focused VIPRE Security has launched VIPRE Endpoint Security – Cloud Edition, their first full cloud offering. It’s something their partners have been clamouring for for some time. It’s also just the first in a planned series of cloud versions of VIPRE solutions.

“We have traditionally been an on-prem solution, but we have had a cloud capability,” said Usman Choudhary, Vice President of Product Development at VIPRE. “We had capabilities of integrating around Microsoft Active Directory, and over a year and a half ago we introduced roaming – cloud based capabilities when in mobile type of environments. That was a big hit, but it wasn’t a full cloud solution, just around mobility and roaming.”

Choudhary acknowledged that VIPRE has not taken a forceful stand in developing a cloud product.

“Security has been slower to move to the cloud because of compliance issues, so we weren’t too aggressive,” he said. “We are strong in health care and banking, and they were more cautious there. That has changed a lot, however, in the last year and a half. Our MSP partners also pushed us for a cloud version because of the cost of maintaining an additional server.”

Choudhary said they see some advantages in being a relatively late player to the endpoint cloud.

“Many of our competitors took their server-based solutions of many years, and just slapped them into the cloud,” he said. “That doesn’t work. We didn’t just put our server solution into the cloud and check the boxes. We took the time, with focus groups to determine what problems specifically customers wanted us to solve with our cloud solution.  Our competitors still say we are a year and a half late to the cloud, but we focused on areas where we saw gaps.”

Choudhary identified three such areas: usability; operational efficiency and security visibility,” he said.

“We have improved usability by simplifying administration,” he said. “It allows you to purchase, configure and deploy VIPRE Cloud in three to four clicks, and in less than ten minutes. Everything is pre-built, which gives you the immediate insight and actionable data to drill in and drill down very quickly. We had 200 people in our beta, so many that we had to shut it down, because it had such an overwhelming response. It was a unique and delightful new user experience.

“It also gives you operational efficiency to keep it all updated, and allow you to avoid policy misconfigurations,” Choudhary added. “The automated updates and real-time displays of system health are based on machine learning data that traditional AV products just don’t give you.”   VIPRE’s Threat Analyzer sandbox provides full deep-scan analysis, Indicators of Compromise generation and machine learning model training.

Security visibility is provided by dynamic dashboards with interactive visualization and powerful timeline views for immediate threat detection, analysis and remediation.

“We have capabilities around that we think are pretty powerful, and which shut WannaCry down completely,” Choudhary said. “We have built this on top of the AWS infrastructure, so it is highly scalable and reliable.  “We have worked closely with their architects to make this industrial grade – providing things like full disaster recovery and high availability, which many do not.”

Choudhary said that these operational and efficiency capabilities are less prevalent in the SMB space than many think. Data from a survey of 250 IT managers that VIPRE recently commissioned found that 47 per cent have to manually collect data from various sources and only 41 per cent have access to an online security dashboard.

“In awards from AV-Comparatives, we are also consistently in the top categories, and have been for six quarters in a row,” he said. “For the channel, it’s important for a solution to be light as well as offer top protection.”

VIPRE was known for years as ThreatTrack, but is rebranding the company – and its other products as well – around its flagship offering. Choudhary provided details on VIPRE’s plans to put these other solutions in the cloud.

“We will quickly do this with our on-prem email solution for Exchange and Office 365, then Network Security and sandboxing,” he said. “Our vision is that these tools like sandboxing and threat intelligence have only been available to larger enterprises because they are costly. Our vision is to bring them to the cloud and make them available, bringing in advanced capabilities in and making things simple to use while putting more intelligence ant your fingertips. Some cloud solutions are designed to be too complex for MSPs. We want to simplify it and put it into a single pane of glass.”

Choudhary also indicated the increased cloud focus will lead to significant channel additions.

“Our existing partners have been chomping at the bit for this,” he said. “When we gave the down payment [the roaming capability] a year and a half ago, they clapped. But we do think this will allow us to expand and target a broader audience, so will also result in an expansion of channel partners.”

VIPRE Endpoint Security – Cloud Edition is available today and pricing starts at $USD 30 per user.