Cloud Antivirus runs smooth but slow

Last week CNET wrote about Panda Security's new antivirus offering in a cloud format as alternative to the desktop antivirus. One of the goals of moving this offering to a cloud is to off load the processing used by the desktop system. It also offers prioritization based on threat type.

Unfortunately, there's one thing about cloud services that few vendors can get away from, and Panda seems to be no exception, and that's performance. CNET reports:

The big concern about a cloud-based antivirus is performance, and Cloud Antivirus handled itself decently enough--although it's not a record-setter. On a ThinkPad T42 with a 1.7 GHz Pentium M chip, 1.5 MB RAM, and running Windows XP SP2, Cloud Antivirus used about 23 MB of RAM when idle.
When running a scan, the scan client ate around 40 MB, but the main client jumped to around 32 MB. The scan also took a long time, with only 45 percent of the computer scanned in more than 30 minutes. Pausing the scan client dropped the usage rate from 40 MB to 2 MB.

So, we'll have to see whether new technologies like WAN Optimization can help resolve the slowness issue of services in the cloud, but for now, it still looks like most IT administrators may want to wait for an improvement in speed before moving their users to the cloud.