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By Laton McCartney
In a bid to beef up enterprise security, Symantec has made several recent moves to strengthen its offerings of enterprise security products. As example, the Silicon Valley software security firm, which was ranked number 19 on the 2009 CIOZone 100 list, just announced its Managed Backup Services.
The new offering, which provides management of backup and recovery operations, is aimed at organizations that have increasingly more platforms, applications, servers, virtual machines and databases to protect than ever before.
The managed backup announcement comes on the heels of Symantec's recent acquisition of privately held Mi5 Networks, a Web security company, for an undisclosed sum.
"The acquisition of Mi5's Web security technology positions Symantec to expand on its email gateway and endpoint security offerings to provide comprehensive protection at the most common entry points to secure businesses against quickly evolving Web-based malware," Francis deSouza, Senior Vice President Enterprise Security Group, told CIOZone. "By offering effective protection and ensuring systems and critical information are readily available, Symantec provides multi-layered solutions for securing and managing business assets."
The Web security offering will initially be sold as a standalone product, but it is expected to be included in the Protection Suites at a later date, deSouza says.
At the same time Protection Suites have become more comprehensive, the company claims. "The Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition now includes Symantec BackUp, System Recovery Desktop Edition and Symantec Network Access Control Starter Edition," says deSouza. "These capabilities were previously offered as standalone products only and not as part of a suite. Symantec is extending protection to include desktop/laptop backup and recovery. This allows users to minimize downtime by recovering individual files and folders in seconds, or complete Windows systems in minutes."
Protection Suite Enterprise Edition offers savings of up to 70%. And can be acquired with one decision, one purchase and one strategic vendor relationship for complete protection, deSouza says.
Asked who in the enterprise is buying enterprise security offerings today, deSouza says: "On the enterprise side, security is being purchased by a combination of functional and strategic IT. Historically, buying decisions of products such as anti-malware, firewalls, intrusion prevention, etc. have been made by functional IT groups. Strategic IT and CIOs are engaging in buying decisions around security topics such as data loss prevention and compliance. CIOs and strategic IT groups are involved in security discussions such as protecting information, automating compliance processes and lowering overall cost and complexity.
"For example, a recent Ponemon Institute study found that 59% of American workers admitted to taking confidential data when they left their jobs in 2008. Seventy-nine percent admitted knowing it was against corporate policy. This is an issue that CIO's are aware of and actively involved."
New Symantec CEO Enrique Salem is apparently charting a new course for the company. At the recent Storage Networking World (SNW) gathering, Salem talked about the coming convergence of backup and archiving. "Why touch data more than once? Users should be able to migrate directly from backup to archives or vice versa under a single policy," Salem said. "We see backup and recovery and archive becoming features, ultimately with the same management interface."
The company's former CEO John Thompson has retired but will stay on as chairman of the board at a salary of $500,000 a year.
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