Technology

After months of being available as a beta version, Panda Cloud Antivirus has been released today. The antivirus software, which has been offered as a public beta since April 2009, received more press coverage than conventional free antivirus software programs thanks to its cloud based approach.

This approach moves some of the virus scanning away from the local computer system to the cloud, a location that Panda calls Collective Intelligence. The benefit of this approach is obvious.

Instead of having to update the local antivirus database all the time with new virus information most of the updates are happening on the security servers in the Internet. It also means that information from all computer systems that run Panda Cloud Antivirus are automatically shared with all other users.

Bandwidth could be an issue but it is in fact not. Why? Because files do not necessarily have to be uploaded to the cloud if they are already known. And new files usually are known pretty quickly thanks to the millions of users that use Panda Cloud Antivirus. Privacy is ensured by scanning some file types locally including Word and Excel documents.

And version 1.0 introduces additional improvements over the beta versions and conventional antivirus software.

Users who are interested in trying out Panda Cloud Antivirus can download it for free at the Cloud Antivirus website where it is available for most Microsoft Windows operating systems. Panda Cloud Antivirus was recently rated best free antivirus software at blocking known malware over at PC World.