When choosing an anti-spam solution, there is always an unfortunate trade-off between effectiveness in filtering out spam and the possibility of misidentifying important messages as spam (known as false positives).

What's more convenient than your toaster? Plug it in, chuck in some bread, push the button, and you get toast. That simplicity, of course, is what vendors hope to call to mind by labeling their security products "appliances." E-mail, antivirus, firewalls-you name it and somebody is pushing a piece of hardware that promises both high performance and no-hassle setup. And although they may not all be as easy to use as a toaster, Peter Lindstrom, director of security strategies at the Hurwitz Group, says the appliance hype is generally good news. "It's an indicator that some of these product markets are maturing," he says, although he points to the Web services area as an exception-an immature technology where the word appliance is nonetheless being bandied about.

Part of my role at Sun is responsibility for the certification of antivirus software with Sun StorageTek 5000 NAS Appliances. Certification is the final step of the process required to enable a NAS Appliance to work with an antivirus software product. Prior to certification the NAS Engineering team has to work with the antivirus ISV to ensure that our products work correctly together as all antivirus products work slightly differently.

ProStor Systems, a leading developer of removable disk storage solutions for data protection and archive applications, today announced general availability of its InfiniVault(TM) archive appliance, the world's first removable disk archive solution using the company's market-leading RDX(R) removable disk technology. The InfiniVault product family is sold by a network of high-value resellers throughout North America.

Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition and Symantec Mail Security 8200 Series were named among Information Security magazine's 2006 Products of the Year in the February 2006 edition of the publication.

The busy antispam marketplace has another new entrant: Los Altos, Calif.-based Barracuda Networks, which today unveiled a line of hardware appliances to fight spam and computer viruses.

We all have a policy to counter the threat of malicious virus threats and while they look good in the procedures manual, does the reality match your expectations? It's all well and good installing antivirus (AV) software on all our desktops and servers but how do we ensure they all carry the very latest detection engines and virus signature files?

Panda Software, leading antivirus developer, scoops all antivirus companies with another FIRST in the industry. Anticipating Microsoft's worldwide release of Windows Server 2003 on April 24, Panda Software announced the launch of Panda Antivirus for Windows Server 2003 to take advantage of all the technological innovations incorporated in the new Microsoft platform.

Fortinet security appliances run from the FG50, for small business, which cost around £500, through its enterprise-orientated product (e.g. FG400- around £6000) to what the company describes as carrier-class anti-virus firewalls.

Tumbleweed MailGate delivers the most robust, effective and easy to manage email security available. Through its unrivaled content filtering, anti-virus, anti-spam, and intelligent edge defense, MailGate protects any organization, large or small, against fast-moving virus outbreaks, botnets, spam, and denial-of-service attacks - eliminating up to 90 percent of email traffic before it enters your organization.