Sophos and Virtual Computer Form Alliance to Secure Virtual Environments

BOSTON: Global IT security and data protection firm Sophos today announced that it has formed a global alliance with Virtual Computer, a leader in the distributed desktop virtualization management market. Virtual Computer’s NxTop® customers now have the option of selecting Sophos Anti-Virus profiles to help proactively safeguard their virtual environment from suspicious activity, viruses, and other malware threats.

NxTop, Virtual Computer’s flagship solution, enables desktop IT administrators the ability to create flexible, dependable, and secure endpoints for various combinations of laptops, desktops, VDI, or cloud computing. Ensuring that these environments are secure remains a critical component in the overall success of virtualization and future adoption. Unlike traditional virtual images that require signatures and updates to be re-processed every time a virtual image is booted, NxTop preserves all Sophos updates each time a session is turned on and off – saving time, increasing performance, and providing immediate protection.

“Virtualization requires both existing security and data protection requirements to be ported to, and optimized for, new platforms, but also offers opportunities for new paradigms of protection,” said Arabella Hallawell, Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Sophos. “Sophos is committed to supporting current and emerging security and compliance customer needs within virtualized environments, and we are excited to announce our collaboration with Virtual Computer, a leader and innovator in bare metal hypervisor and virtual desktop management technologies.”

“Virtual Computer and Sophos have been working together for over a year to define what it means to bring together client-side virtualization and security,” said Simon Graham, Chief Scientist at Virtual Computer. “Integrating our hypervisor technology with Sophos’s anti-virus and security technology is just the beginning of a stream of innovation customers can expect in this emerging area.”