According to Corron, the volume of malware variants being seen by PandaLabs, the firm's security research arm is now reaching 50 000 specific malware items - and their variants - a day.

"This time last year we were seeing around 30 000 malware items a day, but the figure is steadily rising", he said, adding that, because of this, a conventional signature-based IT security approach - where updates are installed on a regular basis - is no longer viable.

It is, he explained, just not feasible to install updates on an hourly basis, as is required to truly keep a company's information security defences as up to date as possible.

"The problem then becomes - how can we transfer IT security knowledge to our customers? The logical step is to store the data in the cloud, and then allow client-based software to access this data on an on-demand basis", he said.

"You also need to start offering highly-automated cloud-based services to cope with what is likely to be a large number of IP transactions on a constant basis", he added.

Read more: http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/5159/panda-clocks-50-000-malware-variants-a-day-explains-need-for-cloud-based-security-technology/