Army buys virus blocker

The Army's Chief Technology Office (CTO) is using a trio of products from Trend Micro Inc., a provider of network antivirus and Internet content security solutions, to help protect the more than 1.1 million Army Knowledge Online (AKO) users from viruses, malicious content and spam.

The Army CTO is responsible for building, enhancing and maintaining AKO as the service's enterprise portal for universal, secure access. It is also responsible for management and oversight of several key initiatives from the Army chief information officer.

The Army CTO is using Trend Micro's InterScan VirusWall for real-time Internet gateway protection against viruses and malicious code in Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, Hypertext Transfer Protocol and FTP traffic. The company's eManager adds spam blocking, content filtering, attachment blocking and e-mail scheduling to optimize bandwidth, and its ServerProtect for EMC Corp.'s Celerra provides centralized virus scanning, pattern updates and event reporting for data storage using Celerra file servers, said David Perry, Trend Micro's global director of education.

Perry said the company uses three main steps to help the Army, and all the company's customers, throughout the lifecycle of a virus outbreak:

* Outbreak protection policy, which identifies the virus and creates and implements a policy rule, usually within six minutes, to ensure it does not spread.

* Service-level agreement, which requires Trend Micro labs to issue a pattern file of the virus within a few hours of its discovery, with penalties for any delays.

* Damage control system, an automated agent delivered to the desktop to assist with "cleanup," which eliminates, or severely decreases, the need for human intervention, thereby speeding recovery. Dan Glessner, senior director of Americas marketing, said Trend Micro's experience in the secure content management market, especially its expertise "with heterogeneous environments — Unix, [Microsoft Corp.] Windows, Linux and other platforms," helped it secure the Army deal. In addition to the Army contract, Trend Micro is part of one of three vendor teams selected last September by the Defense Information Systems Agency to enhance the protection of everything from desktops to wireless devices as part of the DOD and Coast Guard enterprise antivirus software initiative.