Anti malware vendor Kaspersky Lab moved into the hosted services arena for the first time today with the launch of Kaspersky Hosted Email Security AS (Anti-Spam) and Hosted Email Security AV.

The firm went live with the same service in Russia 18 months ago and has since expanded it to Germany and France, according to Kaspersky's European director of hosted services, Gunter Fuhrmann.

Fuhrmann hopes the firm's well-regarded AV technology and other features such as monthly generated reports for business executives will give Kaspersky an advantage in the UK's highly competitive security SaaS market.

"There are three main reasons for choosing [hosted services]; a lower cost of ownership, higher security rate and better quality," he added. "There are different vectors of threat distribution so you still need AV on the desktop, but there's also so many threats coming through the cloud it makes sense to protect at this layer too."

The firm plans to expand the service in the coming months with a business continuity add-on which will allow users to use their email on Kaspersky's system even when their infrastructure is down, said Fuhrmann.

In related news, web security vendor Webroot has launched a new software as a service solution for email security, designed to lower TCO and improve enterprise perimeter defences.

Webroot E-mail Security SaaS is built on technology from hosted security provider Email Systems, which the firm merged with last November.

The service features protection against malware, phishing and spam, and includes business continuity capabilities, archiving and a guaranteed 99.999 per cent service availability.

“At enterprise levels, security and security management is often a complex and time consuming affair," said Webroot chief operating officer, Mike Irwin. " Webroot’s SaaS solution has re-defined this problem by eliminating the pain, and cost, of hardware and software management."