Security outfit Panda is offering free copies of its beta anti-virus program that they’ve dubbed Cloud Antivirus. Rather than caching definitions from a single remote server (like most AV programs), Cloud AV uses infection telemetry gathered from every other PC running the application. The end result is that virus identification and removal should happen much faster than with traditional anti-virus.

This sort of technology first reared its head when the University of Michigan developed a technology called CloudAV in August of last year. During our initial interview with the UM researchers, they outlined several reasons why cloud virus detection is a superior approach:

• The cloud aggregates the detection results of many anti-virus engines; a feat that would be improbable, if not impossible, on a client system.
• The cloud offers enough resources to provide virtual behavioral analysis.
• The client buys reduced disk and CPU usage at the cost of increased network utilization.
• The burden of application maintenance is completely removed from the client side.

While not all of these goals have been realized with Panda’s implementation, their Cloud Antivirus touches on the important final three.

The best part? It only uses 16 megs of RAM.