F-Secure Product Life Cycle Policy - Business Products

Overview

Products reach their end of life for various reasons. These reasons may be due to changes in demand, technology innovation and changes in competitive landscape, or the products simply mature over time and are replaced by new ones. While this is an established part of the overall product life cycle, F-Secure recognizes that end-of-life milestones often prompt customers to review the way in which such milestones impact the F-Secure products in their environments.

With this in mind, we have set out F- Secure's End of Life Policy to help customers better manage product end-of-life transition and to understand the role that F-Secure can play in helping them to migrate to alternative F-Secure products and solutions.

Risks of Using Products after their End-of-Life Date

The threat landscape is constantly evolving, which also means changes in the protection offered by F-Secure. Old products cannot respond to all the current threats.

Security fixes and non-security fixes are not provided for unsupported product versions. Virus definition updates are not tested with End-of-Lifed products. This may decrease the protection capability and reliability of old products, causing, for example, the malfunctioning of the product, conflicts with third party software, false positives and negatives.

Policy for Business Products

The Product Life Cycle is set for the Product Series. Multiple product series can be active at the same time. Product Series is defined with product Major Version number, i.e. 6-series and 7-series of F-Secure Client Security.

Product Life Cycle length is three years from General Availability of a Major Version in each Product Series, or until one year after release of a successor major version, whichever is longer.  (Not applicable for Messaging Security Gateway.)

For Protection Service for Business Product Life Cycle length is three years from General Availability of a Major Version in each Product Series, or until one year after release of a successor major version, whichever is shorter.

Inside a Product Series individual product releases do not extend the length of the life span. A product release can be a minor product release or security/non-security hotfix release.

Security Hotfixes are made on the Current version and one version prior to that in each supported product series.

Non-security hotfixes are made on Current version of each supported product series.

Service Pack releases are made on Current version of each supported product series.

F-Secure makes product end of life announcements at the End-of-Life Announcements page. We encourage you to visit this site regularly as it contains useful information regarding F-Secure's end-of-life program.

To inform our customers well in advance of an approaching product End-of-Life milestone, customers will be sent an electronic notification first in 180 days and finally 90 days prior to a product End-of-Life.

F-Secure can use judgment in changing the product life cycle or time different to what is defined in this policy due to reasons like an operating system vendor changing their product support life span, or due to F-Secure's decision to stop selling, manufacturing and supporting a product due to business reasons.

F-Secure reserves rights to change this policy without a prior note in which case new policy is available at Supported products page.