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Symantec enables confidence in connected world

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CIOL Bureau
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LAS VEGAS , US: According to John W. Thompson, chairman and CEO, Symantec Corp., the exponential growth in information had fueled equally explosive growth in infrastructure complexity. Simultaneously, it had multiplied risks to security, availability, performance and compliance. He was delivering the keynote at the ongoing Symantec Vision 2007 Summit in the city.

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According to him, today's extended enterprise included employees, partners, suppliers, and customers, collaborating across time zones with laptops and Blackberries, on email, IM and wikis, just to name a few.

 Thompson added that the growth of the connected world had blurred the lines between enterprises and consumers. New business models, from 24/7, R&D organizations to global supply chains were introducing new ways of serving customers. IT systems were currently the essential drivers of collaboration, innovation and growth.

Enterprises needed to be confident that they have systems and software in place to keep data secure, and that they could make information available, as and when, and where it is needed. Finally, they also needed to be confident of getting the maximum out of their IT investments.

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Similarly, customers needed to be confident too, that their interactions as well as the information they are providing online, and the various devices they were using were both secure and reliable. It was not easy for both customers and enterprises alike to gain such a level of confidence.

 

Thompson added: "IT leaders recognize that the convergence of security, storage and management is a reality in today's IT markets. That the domains of security and infrastructure management are intertwined, and that you cannot separate security risks from the applications or systems infrastructure. As a result, we have seen a fundamental shift, businesses are now more focused on managing risks across their organizations."

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He said Symantec was now in a unique position to address customers needs to reduce IT complexity, cut costs and improve efficiency. Symantec is said to be offering the industry's broadest portfolio focused on risk management to a wide range of customers.

 Storage United and other new initiatives

Thompson touched on some of Symantec's new initiatives, starting with the "other 'S' word" -- storage. With storage demands doubling every two years, it is a known fact that CIOs and IT managers are being pushed to the limits and running out of space, money and people.

 He cited examples of some enterprises, which had little idea of their existing storage capacities. One bank thought it was 72 percent utilized, though actually, it was only 27 percent utilized. Another company thought it was running out of storage space, but by deploying Symantec's Resource Management solution, it found 84TB of unused capacity! Adding to these challenges are the platform, administration and business problems.

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Now most IT organizations have no way of getting a global, end-to-end view of storage. Nor do they have the way to manage storage across entire organizations. To address all of these challenge, Symantec launched a new initiative called Storage United. This initiative is all about uniting platforms, administration and storage requirements.

 Thompson said: "It is our initiative for delivering a single, unified solution that addresses your critical storage requirements. It will get you out of your firefighting mode – and look at storage in a more strategic way. It brings together a number of our leading storage capabilities – backup, archiving, replication and storage resource management."

 As part of this initiative, Symantec also introduced the NetBackup 6.5, an exciting step forward in the world of enterprise data protection. NetBackup 6.5 provides, for the first time, a single platform to manage all storage media, as well as new technologies such as data de-duplication, space-saving snapshots and continuous data protection, respectively.

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Earlier this year, Symantec had launched the Information Foundation, an integrated information risk management solution that prevents data loss. Tomorrow (read, today, June 13 th) Symantec would be introducing the next version of Information Foundation. This is industry first – unifying protection for email, instant messaging and Web messaging – into a single solution.

Symantec will be launching Project Hamlet on June 13th, which is the Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0, as well. It is the culmination of work done to take the technologies acquired from Sygate, Whole Security and Veritas, and integrate those with core Symantec technology to deliver a single, multi-layered security solution. Symantec has integrated its unique SONAR technology, which was first rolled in its consumer products, into Symantec Endpoint Protection.

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 "Taken together, Symantec Endpoint Protection and Information Foundation represent the beginning of a new management paradigm in security," added Thompson. He said this was the first critical step in operationalizing security – the ability to turn security into a standard business process – one that was driven by policy, automated and measurable.

 He also touched upon Symantec Global Services. Drawing on the expertise of its professionals, Symantec can tailor solutions that meet the enterprises' risk profile and performance objectives.

 This is the 10th edition of Symantec's Vision conference and the 25th anniversary of the founding of the company.