I started writing this blog entry with the intention of giving you a view "inside the factory” on how computer security software is made.  But as I thought about it, I realized it’s more accurate to say that you have entrusted us with continuous protection of your machine (and your data, and thereby you).  

Perhaps you didn’t realize this. Let me explain how we do it.

Indeed, we produce versions of our product regularly. I'm sure that some of you have already updated to our latest product version 2011, or you could still be running version 9.0 or version 8.5. These periodic releases deliver all sorts of improvements; new methods of protection, new features, improvements in speed, usability enhancements, etc.

However, what you might not realize is that your copy of AVG is updated continuously. Thousands if not hundreds of thousands of new malware variants are created EVERY DAY. And we have highly automated processes that detect these new threats and build algorithms to defeat them before they ever infect your machine.  

Every few hours or once a day, we push those updates to your machine, you probably don't even notice it. So what’s the role of a product release?  Partly, it’s to enhance our underlying "engines” with the ability to express new algorithms and deliver better protection as a result. So, releases and continuous updates go hand in hand.

What should you do with this knowledge?  Run the latest version of our product. And keep it updated regularly.

A last thought: for the vast majority of our users, their expectation of a successful security product is that "it just works”, or "set it and forget it”.  

I couldn’t agree more; leave the hard work to us. Computer threats are very sophisticated and always changing. Delivering continuous protection, as I described above, is one way we live up to user expectation. In future blog posts, I will talk about other ways we do so today and might in the future.

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