Astaro

Astaro was a cybersecurity company headquartered in Nottingham, United Kingdom, that specialized in secure email gateway, web filtering, and threat detection solutions. Founded in 2003 by industrial designers and security engineers, the firm positioned itself as a vendor of unified threat management (UTM) appliances targeted at small to medium‑sized enterprises. In its early years, Astaro gained traction for its user‑friendly web‑filtering appliance, the Astaro Web Filter, which combined content filtering with anti‑spam and anti‑virus protection in a single device.

The product line expanded in the mid‑2000s to include the Astaro™ Secure Email Gateway, a hardened platform for protecting inbound and outbound email traffic, and the Astaro–Lite series, which offered web protection for single‑site deployments. Each product leveraged a modular architecture, allowing administrators to combine services such as certificate management, policy enforcement, and secure push technology.

In 2014, Astaro introduced the Astaro Enterprise UTM, a next‑generation management interface that integrated advanced threat intelligence feeds and automated policy updates across devices. Throughout its lifespan the company maintained a focus on ease of deployment, particularly through its proprietary plug‑and‑play hardware appliance line.

On 5 September 2017 Trend Micro announced the acquisition of Astaro, with the aim of incorporating Astaro’s web‑filtering and email‑gateway technologies into its business‑to‑business security portfolio. The acquisition was completed in November 2017, and the Astaro brand was subsequently phased out as its products were integrated into Trend Micro’s solutions suite.