The engine, the core of any anti-virus product, is a software module that is purpose-built to find and remove malicious code. The engine is developed independently of any specific product implementation. So it ‘plugs-in’ equally well into personal products (such as personal scanners or real-time monitors), or solutions for servers, mail scanners, file servers, firewalls and proxy-servers. These products may be developed by the engine developer, or they may be developed by third parties who integrate the engine into their application or business process using the engine SDK.

The reliability of malicious code detection, and hence the security level provided by the products that use it, is determined by the quality of the engine.