Kaspersky to make life easier for partners with transparency plans

One of the easy attacks to make against Kaspersky Labs has been to focus on its Russian heritage and then raise questions of trust and regardless of whether it has any validity it has made an impact on brand association.

Those issues have dogged the security firm and seen it face issues gaining government business in both the UK and US.

Although it has not been reported by the vendor's major partners as being an issue that comes up in the pitch the criticisms of the firm have potentially made life more difficult for partners.

The decision by the vendor, as part of its Global Transparency Initiative, to move a number of core processes from Russia to the famously neutral Switzerland, should stem a lot of the criticisms about Russian ties.

Customer data storage and processing, software assembly and threat detection updates will all be handled in Switzerland, with an independent third party supervising the work.

By the end of next year the firm will have opened a data centre in Zurich handling information from European users, plus a growing number of other territories.

“In a rapidly changing industry such as ours we have to adapt to the evolving needs of our clients, stakeholders and partners," said Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab.

"Transparency is one such need, and that is why we’ve decided to redesign our infrastructure and move our data processing facilities to Switzerland. We believe such action will become a global trend for cybersecurity, and that a policy of trust will catch on across the industry as a key basic requirement," he added.

The firm first announced the Transparency Plan last October, when it was facing several problems in the States, with a ban on the use of Kaspersky Lab’s software in US government systems and media reports that Russian hackers using the company’s antivirus software to search for classified US government documents.