SoHoBlue Product Background Information

The cheekily named SoHoBlue – so called, because it is designed for ‘Small Offices and Home Offices' and is very blue – has been created to offer small business with up to ten PCs, the very highest standards of internet security. It offers a full range of protection and best of all it keeps itself automatically updated with the latest countermeasures.

Many small businesses will use the internet to communicate with customers and suppliers by email, many taking all-important orders in the same way. The internet is easy to use and a powerful business tool, but there are some significant downsides which pose threats to businesses of all sizes.

Best known is the threat posed by viruses. Everyone will have heard of someone, who has lost some or all of their information from their PC because of a virus. Hence most homes and businesses install the anti-virus software that is delivered with their new PC. Once a business grows however, keeping all the PCs updated with the latest anti-virus software can be confusing and time consuming.

The bad news is however, those people creating viruses have unfortunately not stopped developing new threats and have become far more sophisticated. The motives behind all these efforts have also changed. Viruses and similar nasties known as worms and trojans, together with all sorts of other new threats are collectively known as ‘malware'. Malware was initially designed by sad people who thought it worthwhile to vandalise whole PCs or just certain categories of information. There are well publicised news stories of people ‘hacking' or breaking into banks or government computer systems. Some of this in the past has been motivated by the academic challenge, but is still illegal!

Today's threats are of a much more sustained and malevolent nature. Those creating these threats have one thing on their mind – financial gain. Rather than destroying or vandalising, they are spying typically for financial information or data which they can pass on to others for monetary gain. This has become far more efficient and is very organised crime, often being conducted from countries on the other side of the world – such is the global high-speed connectivity of the internet.

The good news is that the 'good guys' have invested in internet security technology, created by some of the cleverest brains in the world. They have built evermore sophisticated firewalls to stop hackers getting in and produced a whole range of countermeasures for all types of viruses and other threats; then combined them together to make them work in unified fashion. The internet security industry has called these techniques ‘Unified Threat Management' or UTM for short.

The even better news in that these same UTM mechanisms have been brought together in a unit that is affordable for small businesses, physically small enough to fit into the tiniest office and easy to install; keeping itself automatically updated with the latest countermeasures. This unit is called SoHoBlue.