Huawei Signs MoU with Avira to Announce Partnership on Cloud-Based Zero Day and Malware Protection

[San Francisco, February 14, 2016] On the second day of RSA2017, Huawei and Avira signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and announced a partnership to deliver cloud-based zero day and malware protection worldwide. The partnership will allow Huawei to provide customers with optimized content security protection by increasing detection rates without detracting from performance.

Liu Lizhu (Left), General Manager of Security Gateways of Huawei, and Travis Witteveen (Right), CEO of Avira, are signing the MoU.

While online file transfers and shares enable digital transformation among businesses, they can also increase the spread of viruses and malware. However, if businesses choose to deploy anti-virus software, they risk damaging the performance of their computer systems. As a result, enterprises are increasingly interested in adopting malware database solutions that not only protect against advanced persistent threats and vulnerabilities like zero day, but also offer system stability and high performance. The collaboration between Huawei and Avira solves this need, affording companies the security protection of anti-malware along with the high detection rates – and high performance – of a firewall.

Specifically, Huawei and Avira’s partnership involves integrating Avira’s advanced anti-malware and zero day protection technology into Huawei’s Next-generation Firewall. Huawei’s Next-Generation Firewall contains an Intelligent Awareness Engine (IAE), or local stream-based engine, which constantly works to inspect files and update virus signature databases to detect and remove viruses. Concurrently, Avira’s protection technology – which is currently deployed by global companies across an array of industries – performs real-time security intelligence gathering to provide reputation reference; this intelligence is then integrated into the Huawei cloud to support the Next-Generation Firewall in detecting threats at higher rates. In this way, Huawei’s malware protection system is both more efficient and effective than solutions currently available in the industry.

“Zero day and malware threaten business and consumers alike, and Avira is pleased to be a key technology within Huawei’s content security portfolio,” said Travis Witteveen, CEO of Avira. “With this partnership, Huawei’s Next-Generation Firewall customers will benefit from Avira’s advanced cloud-based malware protection, which gathers security intelligence every minute of every day from our existing 500 million installations, by having it protect their customers as threats emerge in real-time.”

“Huawei’s ever-expanding market share of firewall products around the globe has triggered an increasing need for content security capable of firewalls,” said Liu Lizhu, general manager of Security Gateways at Huawei. “This worldwide cooperation with Avira enables Huawei to help customers obtain higher content security protection efficiency with higher system performance, thus greatly improving the competitiveness of Huawei's Next-Generation Firewall products and solutions."

There is currently an industry-wide consensus that the only way to cope with network threats is to build a security ecosystem. In line with Huawei’s integration strategy, the cooperation between Huawei and Avira will play an important role in helping enterprise customers further improve their network security levels, while also promoting the development of the security industry at large.