Antivirus in the cloud: Is remote security remotely secure?

Panda Security has been producing antimalware and security products for desktop PCs since 1990, and late last year its desktop suite scored well during virus-detection tests. This is its first cloud-based antivirus product, currently in beta.

It does several interesting things, but first and foremost it uses a centralised virus definitions database, stored on Panda's servers. This means you're always having your computer monitored, scanned and protected by the latest, up-to-the-minute database of known threats.

The other advantage is that as new threats are caught on a user's computer, they're scanned, analysed and disinfected in the cloud, supposedly within minutes. Protection against these new threats is immediately made available to all other connected users without any need for them to update their software.

That is, as long as you're connected to the Internet. The app does store an offline database on your machine as well, but this database will become outdated for as long as you remain offline -- the traditional vexation of antivirus apps. Of course you can't contract new viruses while offline, but one may become active if you execute a file for the first time.

 Panda Cloud Antivirus will still protect you without an Internet connection

The software is lightweight, and takes up very little memory on your computer -- just 5MB of RAM on our infected netbook, in fact. The interface is clean and simple, and although scanning an entire hard disk seemed a little slower than with conventional applications, it successfully detected viruses we knew were on our machine, even when we axed our Internet connection.

Panda Cloud Antivirus is in beta, and until released as a stable release we can't advise you ditch your current security for it. This is the most exciting cloud-based antivirus product we've seen to date, however, and an intriguing take on exploiting the wisdom of the crowds' infected machines to protect other users in real time.

In an impressively extensive security test, the software was scored favourably by PC Mag's security expert in lab tests. You can try it for free here.

Next: On-demand scanning...