Kaspersky to end hosted services this month

Kaspersky has confirmed that it will commence winding down its hosted security service this month.

All existing customers on Kaspersky Hosted Security would be fully supported through to August 2013.

Now it is passing users to partner Spamina after ‘an exhaustive study of the SaaS market'.

“... we [will] ensure customers have the same high level of protection they've become accustomed to with KHS. In addition, Spamina offers additional valuable features such as email continuity, automatic email backup, optional webmail access, rules engines, great spam and malware filtering protection, cloud-based architecture, Kaspersky Lab's anti-virus engine as well as a partner console for easily setting trial accounts, activating licenses and manage your contract renewals from a single point console.”

Kaspersky confirmed that it and Spamina had developed a special migration offer for KHS customers, and it had also introduced Managed Service Provider to offer resellers the opportunity to offer Kaspersky's products to their end-users under a managed service, with monthly billing available.

It saw a "very strong market potential" for endpoint protection and planned to allocate significant resources to it's flagship B2B endpoint protection suite products.

“After careful analysis, we have come to the conclusion that KHS business model is not sustainable over time..”

AppRiver CTO Joel Smith said cloud services were ‘not easy' adding they required "a lot of management".

“We see email as being an economy of scale and ramped up with cloud services. If a user does it in the data centre they end up with issues and more costs. If you are a pure play security provider, then it is different from other models. Some users will go with a pure play provider such as Symantec, but like Kaspersky it is not their core service.”

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com