Kaspersky launches Sydney-based hosted security

Security vendor Kaspersky Labs has quietly launched a hosted security service from two Sydney data centres which offers email and web threat protection as a hosted service.

Kaspersky Hosted Security Services has been running for select customers from a cluster of servers located in two Sydney data centres since mid-October.

The vendor has kept mum on which data centres are hosting the service, saying only that the “two biggest data centre providers in Australia” have signed on to run the cluster.

By that rationale, the hosters are likely to be Global Switch and Equinix.

The service essentially redirects user domains and MX records to the Kaspersky server cluster, where spam and malware is filtered out and sent back to the customer’s LAN.

“It works in essence like a proxy – all users use a proxy in the cloud so-to-speak, rather than having security infrastructure at every standpoint,” explained Bernhard Bengler, SaaS and cloud services director for Kaspersky Asia-Pacific.

The service is sold on a per-user basis rather than per-mailbox, he said, to allow for those users with multiple mail accounts.

But unlike many cloud services, the service is sold on an annual subscription basis rather than month-to-month – unless a reseller negotiates a particularly large deal.

Bengler expected the service to be popular among those users concerned about data sovereignty.

“We don’t have the philosophy of running one giant data centre,” he said. “Our approach is local data centres – we think the local component is very important to the customer.

“Customers always ask that data is in-country, or at least know where the data is,” he said.

Support will also be provided locally, he said.

“The most important message is that we are local – we provide support for the product out of Australia, not redirected to India.”

Bengler said Kaspersky’s local server clusters can handle 100,000 users. Kaspersky has promised to build out further infrastructure if only 50 percent of that number was ever utilised, to ensure that “no mail systems would be affected if a customer got hit by spam tsunami.”