Security specialist Sophos has announced the availability of its Virtual Email Security Appliance, designed to bring messaging data protection and easy administration to VMware environments. It uses the same core Sophos technology as the hardware appliance, but the Virtual Email Security Appliance can be deployed as a virtual machine image. Intriguingly, Sophos says it’s a sign of things to come.

According to the press release, the sales pitch for the Virtual Email Security Appliance is the same as the on-premises, which is fitting considering the two share the same core. It uses integrated anti-malware, encryption, data loss protection (DLP), anti-spam and IT automation to better protect endpoints and the network, and administrators can manage it all from a single view.

But the real story is the news that Sophos is investing heavily in virtual appliances in 2011, citing a rise in flexible, cost-saving virtualized datacenter environments. And while Sophos is announcing this solution the week of the VMware Partner Exchange, it’s also worth noting the virtual appliance itself is in the standard Open Virtualization Format, or OVF – not a proprietary VMware format.

This isn’t the first virtual appliance TalkinCloud’s reported on in 2011. Virtualized environments are very often somewhere between on-premises and cloud, and it’s apparent solution developers such as Sophos see that as an opportunity for their channel.

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