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MessageLabs Small Business Solutions is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses, offering the company's Skeptic technology to protect against viruses, trojans, spam, and phishing attacks.

As well as protection against these threats, the MessageLabs solution also gives companies web URL filtering, allowing companies to shut out undesirable or unnecessary websites from their employees.

It's available as either 'Email Security', 'Web Security', or 'Email and Web Security'. An upgrade is also available for the email packages allowing companies to set and enforce usage policies for email.

Pricing for the 'Email and Web Security' offering starts as £4.50 per user. We were told this represents a 25 per cent discount over the list price for these services.

MessageLabs claims small businesses are at the front line in the spam onslaught, receiving

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twice as much junk mail as medium sized companies and a third more than large businesses. Furthermore, small businesses are often least well positioned to protect themselves from online threats, being less likely to have full-time IT staff dedicated to the task.

'Security is the top issue for any business today, large or small,' notes Gary Chen, SME IT Infrastructure & Applications Analyst at Yankee Group. 'Small companies are especially challenged though, lacking the IT expertise and resources to conquer something as complex as IT security, while also facing the same threats as large enterprises. Managed services are really the only way for these businesses to put up a proper defence, given the situation and the desire to focus on their core business and other more strategic IT and business issues.'

MessageLabs claims that some two thirds of its current customer base are SMEs.

It says that many of these currently take a component of what MessageLabs offers. 'They would like, and need, a more comprehensive package of protection - but can only do so if its cost effective for them, hence the new solutions and prices. We took a lot of feedback from our current clients and partners in developing these solutions and expect many of them as well as new clients to now take on a suite of services,' we were told.

For more information, visit the MessageLabs website.