Symantec's new view: Security + availability = information integrity

Symantec, the global leader in information security, today unveiled a fundamentally new way for enterprise customers to view and manage the risks around protecting, securing and using their most valuable asset, their information. Backed by partners and customers, the concept that Symantec calls "Information Integrity" addresses the need to keep businesses up, running and growing, even in the event of Internet threats or other disruptive events.

"Digital information has become an influential phenomenon," said John W Thompson, Symantec chairman and CEO. "In fact, many believe a substantial part of the world's economy revolves around the use, storage and movement of digital information. It is a powerful enabler, but only if it is both secure and available."

In a simultaneous broadcast viewed by Symantec staff, partners and customers across the world, Thompson and other senior executives discussed the importance of balancing security risk with business opportunity. The broadcast enabled Symantec to discuss how its services and products help organisations analyse risk and plan for growth while protecting their assets and brand.

"We have been taking the opportunity recently to connect with our customers across the country to communicate this new view, and I'm confident that this new vision speaks to their business needs in our fast paced and increasingly mobile economy," says Patrick Evans, regional manager of Symantec Africa. "We have seen a massive acceptance curve over the past 10 years in the region in terms of technology, and can clearly see the critical nature of the digital information held in the businesses and governments across the region.

"Our focus is therefore to educate, support and assist our customers and partners in understanding the global benchmarks for Internet security and information integrity. This translates into ensuring customers understand how to manage their risk, to ensure data is not compromised," says Evans.

Symantec's approach provides customers with an end-to-end business process for balancing security with availability beginning with the need for organisations to assess the risk of vulnerabilities, exposures and threats. Once a valid risk assessment has been performed, organisations must act to shield information from attack, mitigate threats, prioritise preventative actions based on real-time threat alerts and design in the recovery capability to deal with accidents and disasters when they happen.

"The unification of security and systems management is inevitable. Starting with patch management and moving towards full-fledged configuration management, security issues are increasingly associated with business continuity," according Chris Christiansen, VP of IDC's Security Products & Services.

"Symantec and BMC, with its Business Service Management strategy, share the same goal of helping customers manage the complexity of their IT environment and maximising the business value of their IT infrastructure," said Robert E Beauchamp, president and CEO of BMC Software. "In June this year, our companies released the integration of BMC Software's Remedy Action Request System and Remedy Help-Desk with Symantec DeepSight Alert Services and Symantec Incident Manager. Through this we can now offer our mutual customers unparalleled coordination in the remediation of security incidents."

In support of the information integrity initiative, Symantec announced new products and services, including:

Symantec Enterprise Security Manager 6.1: The newest version of Symantec's industry-leading policy compliance solution, Symantec Enterprise Security Manager (ESM), offers powerful compliance reporting features and pre-configured assessment templates for Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach-Bliley. By identifying threats and measuring compliance to security practices and regulations, ESM is a key element in achieving information integrity by helping organisations better manage their information environment.

Symantec Gateway Security 4.0: The Symantec Gateway Security Appliance 400 Series provides a comprehensive solution including firewall, intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, anti-virus policy enforcement, content filtering, virtual private networking (VPN) and gateway networking functionality in a single, easy-to-use appliance designed for remote and branch office sites. In addition, the Symantec Gateway Security 400 Series can function as a standards-based, secure wireless LAN (WLAN) access point. Symantec Gateway Security 400 Series appliances are a key component in achieving information integrity by helping organisations better secure their networks at remote and branch office sites.

Symantec LiveState Recovery Products: Symantec LiveState Recovery family of products provide fast, reliable and cost-effective system and data recovery. The Symantec LiveState Recovery products capture a point-in-time operating state of an entire server or desktop, which includes the operating system, applications, data and settings into one easy-to-manage file. These point-in-time snapshots are created without interrupting user productivity or application usage. Users can perform a full system restoration, a complete bare metal recovery or retrieve individual files or folders in minutes to ensure information availability. Three editions of Symantec LiveState Recovery are available: Symantec LiveState Recovery Advanced Server 3.0, Symantec LiveState Recovery Standard Server 3.0 and Symantec LiveState Recovery Desktop 3.0.

For additional information on Symantec's revolutionary new approach to information integrity and the products and services offered today by Symantec to help enterprise customers balance security with information availability, go to http://www.information-integrity.com/.