This article is more than 1 year old

Symantec drives security deep into enterprise

Information integrity

This week, Symantec has unveiled its new corporate positioning. Long regarded as one of the leaders in the security technology space, the vendor has been building out its portfolio of offerings to drive security deep into organisations, whilst maintaining the high levels of computer systems availability that companies need to keep their businesses running efficiently.

Symantec's view is that a company's business information is its most strategic asset and must be protected at all times. This is not something that will be new to any business executive, especially given the number of legal and industry regulations, such as data protection and privacy, Sarbanes-Oxley and regulations regarding food safety that affect a wide variety of businesses. This has upped the ante in the need to protect information from being altered in any way - or protecting the integrity of that information.

In order to be able to assure the integrity of business information, companies need to have the availability to scan all of the computational assets that they have in their networks to gauge the risk of vulnerabilities, security exposures and threats. This allows organisations to understand the resources that they have in place so that risk posed by security exploits that threaten the availability of those systems can be assessed. Once the risk assessment exercise has been performed, organisations are in a better position to address those threats and can prioritise the actions that they are going to take to remediate against those vulnerabilities based on the value of the information to a company.

Once a company is in the position to act on real-time security information, it is better placed to deal with incidents and disasters when they happen, and safeguard against threats in the future by establishing the policies, procedures and control mechanisms that are required for safeguarding information systems. Using Symantec's capabilities for monitoring and managing threats, along with real-time business reporting and analysis, companies are better able to ensure that information integrity is being achieved - taking them one step nearer to legal and industry compliance.

In line with its new corporate positioning initiative, Symantec has just announced the availability of some new products. These include the latest version of its Gateway Security Manager appliance, which provides network security capabilities including firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, antivirus policy enforcement, content filtering and virtual private network technology. This latest version extends gateway security capabilities to include mobile networks with the inclusion of a secure wireless LAN access point, making it suitable for use in remote and branch office environments as well as within the four walls of the corporate office.

Even with effective network security products, disaster can still occur, and information integrity can only be achieved if companies can recover from a catastrophic disaster affecting their networks. For this, Symantec has developed its LiveState Recovery family of products which allow full system restoration or recovery of any files on a server or desktop to ensure that information is available when needed - and hence reducing downtime to a business.

Finally, Symantec has brought out the latest version of its Enterprise Security Manager, which provides functionality for reporting on compliance with regulations, including pre-configured assessment templates designed for specific regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Gramm-Leach-Bliley.

With the release of these new products, Symantec is rounding out its portfolio of products to take it a large step nearer to ensuring the integrity of its customers' information assets. Symantec admits that gaps still remain, but it is working hard to fill in the remaining parts. Companies that should take a look at Symantec's new offerings include those that wish to take a holistic view of all of their information assets in order to drive security right into the heart of their enterprises - exactly where it belongs.

Copyright © 2004, IT-Analysis.com

Related stories

Data protection watchdog distributes email mailing list
Cisco, IBM and MS in network security love-in
Fighting the army of byte-eating zombies

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like