Back up Solutions to solve business concerns

Managing director of Symantec India, Vishal Dhupar in an interview with Pragati Simlote of CyberMedia News, shared his belief that the foundation for any company seeking to achieve information integrity is a resilient infrastructure and talked about and the data storage solution portfolio of Symantec. Excerpts:

 Could you give a brief on the data storage solutions and services portfolio of Symantec?

Symantec offers products for backup and recovery of data and systems, optimizing data storage resource utilization, simplifying administration of heterogeneous environments and provides continuous availability of mission-critical applications and data storage devices. We provide a full range of services to assist our customers in assessing, architecting, implementing, supporting and maintaining their security, data storage, and infrastructure software solutions. Our global services organization also provides customers with maintenance and technical support, consulting, and education services.

Our Application Performance Management products optimize the performance and availability of enterprise applications, while the Data Management Solutions are designed to protect, backup, archive, and restore data across a broad range of computing environments – from large corporate data centers to remote groups and desktop and laptop computers. Infrastructure Management Solutions allow customers to manage virtually any function at any point in the lifecycle of their computing systems and devices, and Data Center Management Solutions help organizations gain control, improve service levels and drive down costs within complex data center environments.

What is Storage Foundation 5.0 family of products all about? What would be the benefit for the customer?

Storage Foundation 5.0 is a next generation data storage management offering that provides unique, advanced capabilities and support for every major operating system, data storage hardware device, database and application. It provides visibility across the entire server environment, control across the entire server environment and mobility of data across the server environment.

Veritas Storage Foundation is sold and supported by a wide range of partners, including Sun, HP, and IBM. Customers would benefit in the following ways: The unique set of Storage Foundation 5.0 solutions will provide IT organizations with unprecedented visibility and control of the diverse server and data storage assets in their data centers, with significant product enhancements including new centralized management capabilities, enhanced data storage virtualization and full support for enterprise applications and databases. The Storage Foundation 5.0 release will streamline management requirements enabling customers to focus on what is really important -- the data -- with efficiencies that have never before been experienced.

The additional benefits to customers include increased operational efficiency with simplified, centralized data storage management and reporting across heterogeneous systems, enterprise performance, reliability and scalability, increased visibility and control of data storage infrastructure across heterogeneous OS and data storage, enterprise-class technical support, etc.

What is e-mail archiving? How big is the opportunity in e-mail archiving and what kind of market exists in India?

E-mail archiving is a systematic approach to ensure a protection of data storage in e-mail messages, so it can be accessed quickly at a later date. Gartner predicts the volume of business e-mail will grow 25 per cent – 30 per cent annually through 2009. That means that the cost of the e-mail infrastructure, including servers and data storage as well as operational costs like backup and data recovery is also increasing. In addition to this, e-mail is increasingly facing many threats, vulnerabilities and compliance requirements.

In the background of the increasing need for e-mail, there exists a huge potential for e-mail archiving solutions in a market like India. For example, Symantec Enterprise Vault, the email archiving solution from Symantec enables organizations to more effectively manage email and other forms of unstructured electronic content by providing a secure, searchable online archive for critical business records, improving employee productivity and ensuring compliance with industry and government regulations and laws requiring the retention and supervision of e-mails.

Enterprise Vault is a part of Symantec’s EMM (Enterprise Messaging Management) portfolio. Solutions under EMM solution portfolio include Symantec Enterprise Vault (EV), Symantec IM Manager (IMM) and Symantec Mail Security (SMS).

Does the company have any specific solutions targeting the SMB segment in India? How bullish is Symantec about growth in this segment?

In the last few years, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and SOHOs have been undergoing a steady revolution by conducting an increasing amount of business electronically, both internally among employees as well as externally with customers, suppliers and other business partners. With increased electronic activity, there is also an explosive growth in the amount of data storage on PCs and servers. The volume of data they must manage is growing at an average of 60 per cent per year.

Data is the lifeblood of any SMB and must be protected despite tighter IT resource and budget constraints. SMBs need means for clearly understanding where data is stored, and how it is accessed, used and transported, to ensure that data loss, leakage, misuse, or a visible breach doesn’t occur. Symantec has a variety of products that ensure full security of data storage. In SMB environments, the application that all desktop users interface with is e-mail. Exchange is probably the most common e-mail. Symantec also has a breadth of application protection solutions targeted at the Exchange platform Symantec Mail Security and Veritas Enterprise Vault.

Symantec is now expanding its commitment to make sure these (SMBs) businesses have the tools to ensure the availability and security of their information assets in an increasingly challenging threat environment.

What kind of data storage technologies are Symantec betting on in future and what would the growth drivers for the company?

Symantec strongly believes that the foundation for any company seeking to achieve Information Integrity is a resilient infrastructure. By combining the right technologies, processes and policies, companies can dramatically reduce the risk of unexpected disruptions and increase their ability to maintain continuity of normal business operations - all this while managing continuity of normal business operations and managing IT costs. This is our focus and future direction.

With the merger of Symantec and Veritas, we can now offer our customers the technology to help them achieve Information Integrity across their organizations to ensure information security and information availability.

In addition, Symantec is committed to expanding beyond e-mail to messaging and beyond to overall messaging management. The result will be a comprehensive platform for ensuring the health of an organization’s mission-critical messaging infrastructure. Symantec is also focused on delivering solutions that solve today’s and tomorrow’s business concerns, which is about protecting against internal and external threats, securing data and not just the device, and providing management and compliance archiving for corporate policy enforcement, human resources, legal risk management and regulatory compliance requirements.

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