During a meeting with a startup this week, the presenter's machine froze up mid-demo in a flurry of errors. Priming for the usual jibes about Windows stability, I was surprised when the blame was heaped instead on the PC's anti-malware/firewall software.

So perhaps they were just being diplomatic; but that aside, this incident together with others I've come across recently suggest that performance degradation caused by security software running on the client machine is becoming a significant issue. The increasing sophistication of attacks has been driving the need for more complex defenses, which in turn are consuming ever greater amounts of system resources.

That's what makes Yoggie's Pico particularly interesting. It's a plug-and-play device the size of a USB flash drive that connects to your computer’s USB port and contains 13 security applications, including anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-phishing, proxies, VPN and a firewall. It allows you to move all those resource-hungry security applications off your PC into a dedicated, security-optimized appliance, and also sports a handful of nifty features like IP address cloaking.

Many segments of the security market have been gravitating towards appliances, particularly at the network edge. Yoggie's Pico is one of the first shots over the bow for an appliance at the endpoint.