Outpost Security Suite Pro – it’s finally here!

At last, two weeks after announcing the release candidate, the final version of Outpost Security Suite Pro (OSS) is ready and downloadable from our website.

Outpost has been finally granted full membership in the club of all-in-one solution providers. Some people say that this “club” is just companies that are opportunistic and taking advantage of users’ desires for simpler solutions to the complex problems of Internet security. As we’ve said before, we’re not just “jumping on the bandwagon”. We will continue to support both our standalone Outpost Pro firewall and the new Security Suite Pro, so our customers are free to decide which solution is best for their particular needs.

Will using a suite instead of a series of standalone products provide a different level of quality and performance? Here’s how we see things:

Outpost Security Suite Pro is a firewall that also offers antispyware, and antivirus, and antispam. Firewall technology is our core competency, so we lead off with that. For Symantec, it’s antivirus. Every e-security company with a suite has taken the same path - building out from its flagship product with additional functionality. It’s unlikely that we will see any suite consist of all five-star products any time soon, but it is a long-term goal. For now, all-in-one products will be judged by how relatively better or relatively worse their various components are, and how well or badly they work together as an integrated whole.

You’ve probably guessed that not all the components in our suite have been developed by Agnitum engineers. After all, who would invent a new anti-virus at this stage? So we did something we’ve never done before - we licensed the anti-virus technology from another company. But of course, we chose technology that meets our high standards - VirusBuster has scored 100 % in VirusBulletin many times. Agnitum’s engineers took that award-winning anti-virus engine and integrated it with our anti-spyware engine to create a powerful all-in-one scanner that detects and removes all kinds of malware using a single engine.

We’ve never made any secret of our preference for proactive defense, as shown by Outpost Firewall. We’ve said many times, and will continue to say, that prevention (proactive protection) is more efficient and more effective than cure (reactive detection and removal). But if malicious code still manages to find a chink in the armor of our firewall, our anti-malware will jump in to complete the protection cycle.

What else? Oh, yes, the anti-spam. Remember the cute little Spam Terrier? Well, he’s now combined his freelance standalone activities with teamwork in the Security Suite. As a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express and a part of OSS, Spam Terrier weeds out spam intelligently using Bayesian filters and “self-learning” capabilities. If you are a fan of other email clients like The Bat or Thunderbird (many requests for them already) , just let us know - we are looking at supporting additional email clients.

Before we hit ‘save’ to complete this posting, we should probably address the ultimate ‘suite vs best-of-breed’ challenge: “Why should I use OSS or any other suite when I can use my own selection of individual preferred applications?” The answer is that either way is good. But if you do use a suite, you have the added benefit of knowing that all the components will work well together (and if they don’t, there is only one company to blame). There is always a risk, albeit a slight one in the case of most commercial products, that there will be security gaps or conflicts between the different products, simply because they were not engineered to work together.

For the most part, security suites are developed for users’ convenience, not for commercial opportunism, and user security remains the highest concern. In that area, OSS is no exception …

Mikhail Penkovsky
Global Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Agnitum Ltd.