Savant Protection Unveils 'Enforcer' Application Whitelisting Product

Hudson, NH – June 30, 2011 – Savant Protection, the leading provider of Automated Application Whitelisting solutions, today unveiled Savant Enforcer. The first solution of its kind, Savant Enforcer realizes Savant Protection’s vision of providing a flexible application whitelisting solution that enforces application policies and dramatically reduces corporate IT and MSP support costs.

Unlike other application whitelisting solutions and traditional reactive antivirus solutions, Savant Enforcer’s breakthrough product balances the need for privileged users to control their computers and IT requirements to protect the organization against malware that bypasses their antivirus products.

“As IT consumerization, social media, and adaptive persistent adversaries continue to transcend and undermine conventional security, it is increasingly necessary to adapt our security and policy enforcement. In the right use cases, application control can reduce the chances of running malicious, unwanted, and even vulnerable (elective) applications. Vendors such as Savant Protection are focused on helping with these challenges," said Josh Corman, Research Director, Enterprise Security Practice at The 451 Group.

With Savant Enforcer, MSPs can provide their customers with proactive endpoint protection that stops zero-day attacks and even the most sophisticated targeted malware. MSPs can now offer the highest level of security against malware while being able to provision different levels of trust to their customers’ end users: from strict application policy enforcement to enabling them to independently add applications. MSPs can now, for the first time, easily protect their diverse customer environments from un-trusted changes without restricting approved users from installing the software they need to do their jobs.

Savant Protection’s purpose-built solutions prevent attacks, both known and yet to be discovered. Its unique and patented approach provides advanced endpoint protection, safeguarding each individual computer with personal whitelists. The preferred application whitelisting solution by MPSs and small to medium sized enterprises, Savant Protection stops malware, including targeted attacks, designer attacks, and zero day attacks as well as viruses and Trojans. Savant ensures that malware cannot propagate across an organization. Specifically designed for flexibility, its ease of implementation and seamless interoperability with antivirus solutions means there is minimal need for ongoing administration and no impact or disruption to the end user.

Aside from strong security and management functionality provided by Savant Enforcer, the product also enables MSPs to reduce their service costs and to significantly reduce unproductive downtime at their customers by limiting the number of endpoint problems that require remediation.

“Savant Protection has spearheaded the use of application whitelisting among MSP’s,” said Kelly Comeaux, CEO of Preferred Data Systems (PDS) , a Michigan-headquartered MSP which specializes in computer system integration and IT management services to small and medium-size enterprises. “With Savant Enforcer we have been able to reduce our tech cost by 81% per managed endpoint. Before Savant we would try to fix a machine for 15 minutes and if non-repairable we would reimage the machine. The software (Savant Enforcer) just will not allow for rogue software to be installed which contributed to most of the problems. This has led to less maintenance work and cost to PDS while keeping the customer up and productive and more importantly happy.”

A dynamic application whitelisting solution, Savant Enforcer achieves that ever elusive balance between security and business enablement, allowing enterprises to…

improve application policy enforcement by only allowing approved software and updates to run; save time and increase end-user and MSP efficiency by provisioning permissions based on user type without adding risk to the organization; reduce security exposures, providing proactive protection against any unknown or targeted malware that bypasses antivirus, including drive-by downloads and malicious attachments.

“Savant Enforcer allows MSPs as well as organizations to provide key users, the ones who need access the most but often are the greatest targets of cyber criminals, to add software themselves without adding risk to the organization,” said Robert Kamsler, VP of Engineering at Savant Protection. “By providing the flexibility to control the ability to install software based on end-user type we can now help satisfy the business needs of the organization while maintaining the utmost security. As the application whitelisting solution noted for innovating the technology, we are pleased that this solution validates our approach of offering all the security advantages of application whitelisting without the business headaches.”

Savant Enforcer:

Automatically adds all user additions to the local whitelist

Provides a unique whitelist for each computer, protecting all users

Includes trusted change filters for all major software updaters

Delivers a log of all user changes

Offers IT support for application lookup and validation

Supports a broad range of user trust options

Works with all major provisioning and endpoint management systems

Supports logs and alerts for SIEM products

Seamlessly works with existing antivirus

About Savant Protection

Savant Protection is a leading privately held vendor of innovative application whitelisting solutions that fill major gaps in the functionality of other endpoint security and management products and provide significant operational and financial benefits to customers. The company’s solutions are easy to integrate with existing systems, are not dependent on a central whitelist database, and can stop zero-day attacks and address the increasing inability of existing endpoint solutions, such as signature-based anti-virus products, to effectively protect against the growing proliferation of sophisticated, targeted malware. Savant Protection’s customers are able to lower costs and increase their organization’s productivity by minimizing endpoint incidents that require remediation and cause unproductive downtime for users. Savant Protection is headquartered in Hudson, New Hampshire, USA. www.SavantProtection.com