Anti-virus vendor Authentium is now offering its AV-scanning SDK to cloud providers.

Authentium, unlike most other AV vendors, has traditionally been focused at the gateway; they offer an SDK designed to be embedded in applications and appliances. (Notably, Authentium is the scanning engine used by Google’s Postini service.) So courting cloud providers is logical for them.

Anti-virus integration makes particular sense for cloud storage providers. Users of cloud storage upload millions of files a day. Many businesses that use cloud storage do so for user-generated content. AV-scanning a file as part of an upload could be just another API call — one that could be charged for on a per-operation basis, just like GET, PUT, and other cloud storage operations. That would turn AV scanning into a cloud Web service, making it trivially easy for developers to integrate AV scanning into their applications. It’d be a genuine value-add for using cloud storage — a reason to do so beyond “it’s cheap”.

More broadly, security vendors have become interested in offering scanning as a service, although most have desktop installed bases to defend, and thus are looking at it as a supplement as opposed to a replacement for traditional desktop AV products; see the past news on McAfee’s Project Artemis or Trend Micro’s Smart Protection Network for examples.