Symantec has signed up Internet Solutions (IS) as its springboard into Africa as part of a plan to roll out software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-mail archiving, back-up and cleaning security solutions.
The value of the deal has not been disclosed, however, Jesper Frederiksen, VP of Symantec Hosted Services for Europe, Middle East and Africa, says it's expected the South African SaaS market is worth several million dollars.
In an announcement made at the Symantec SA Partner Summit 2010, Symantec said it's confident about branching into an alternative business model.
This initiative is being driven by the MessageLabs acquisition Symantec made a year ago, to provide e-mail cleaning services.
The partnership will see IS become Symantec Hosted Services primary route to market in SA with a dedicated Symantec SaaS multi-million rand data centre hosted on IS infrastructure.
Rising SaaS adoption
According to Gordon Love, Symantec regional director for Africa, SA, from an e-mail threat perspective, is high on the agenda of cyber criminals because of its rapid adoption of SaaS and increasing number of new Internet users.
“SA has the second highest SaaS adoption rate in the world, with the UK in the lead,” says Love. “This indicates more than 26% of SA businesses have outsourced their e-mails to a service provider. Basically, almost a third of enterprise business depends on an external service provider.”
[EMBEDED]Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence research found the spam rate in SA in August was 91.3% of all e-mail and one in every 62.5 e-mails in SA contained a virus. This compares to the global average for August of spam at 92.2% and the virus level at one in every 327.6 e-mails.
Frederiksen says: “In the past year, the SaaS adoption rate in SA has grown 12% and we believe that we can accelerate it further with the Symantec, IS partnership.
“Having now spent three months working with IS, we will focus on e-mail archiving solutions, hosting company e-mails at IS' data centre.”
He adds that increasing operating and capital costs for storing and securing e-mail is driving the trend to move security management of e-mail to the cloud.
“A lot of businesses no longer want to be in the game of storing e-mails on legacy systems for several years. Companies want to focus on their core business [and] not on solving a mundane problem such as e-mail cleaning; which is why it makes sense to outsource this service.”
According to Frederikson, Symantec is securing partnerships to become a critical player in providing security and storage solutions to private and public cloud infrastructures.
“The close partnership Symantec has with Internet Solutions means that IS will be our SaaS route to market for SA and the wider continent. We were looking for an African partner that has a strong brand with great capabilities in Internet access and bandwidth.”
He points out that the SaaS service will also aim to solve the problem that many companies face in complying with legislation that stipulates enterprises need to store and archive their e-mails for at least five to seven years.
“All of the complexities in terms of technology and cost are removed, because we can store and clean the e-mails without the customer worrying about storage requirements.”
New opportunities
Hayden Lambertu, IS innovation and technology manager, admits that IS identified gaps in the market, which were not being exploited by the big hosted service providers.
“We feel comfortable to partner with Symantec to enable us to cater for the enterprise requirements and to be able to ship e-mail services to the cloud seamlessly.
“We have the Internet connectivity and with more undersea cables coming in, bandwidth is no longer an issue. We will be gearing up our sales offices to expand into Africa.”
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