Antivirus Software in the Cloud

In a quick scan of my technology recommendations over the years, its seems my antivirus software recommendations have remained largely unchanged. Generally, these have included one or more of the following installed products: Symantec, McAffe, CA, Grisoft, or Trend Micro for ongoing protection. Each of these services ultimately rely on regular batch antivirus updates to make sure they are current.

I recently ran into an interesting new service provided by Panda Security called Panda Cloud Antivirus. While there are certainly other hosted services for virus protection, this service claims to aggregate the computing power of all of its customers in its "cloud" to find and classify viruses faster. The service is free, and since the customers collectively do the work of virus sleuthing, the load on your local system is lighter than other systems. It even works if you disconnect from the internet, caching virus definitions locally similar to more traditional systems, enabling the software to continue protecting your system.

I look forward to investigating this further.