Thompson Q&A: Security, Storage, And Bringing It All Together

Page 1 of 2

John Thompson, chairman and CEO of Symantec Corp., the Cupertino, Calif.-based security and data protection giant, is all about integration: getting security products to work together, getting storage products to work together, and getting security and storage to work together. But in addition to talking bringing his company's products together, he is not shy about taking apart competitors like EMC, Microsoft, and McAfee. Joseph F. Kovar, senior editor of ChannelWeb, recently had a chance to speak with Thompson about security, storage, and the future.

ChannelWeb: Last month, Microsoft was awarded a patent for a "System and method for proactive computer virus protection." Has Symantec had a chance to look at that, and. . . .

Thompson: I'm sure our guys at the research labs have. Candidly, when we saw the patent award, we were somewhat miffed because it looks like what we and others in the industry have been doing for a long, long time. It may just very well be part of a problem that we have observed for many years, which is that the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. is just overwhelmed. They are overwhelmed by the number of patent requests. They're understaffed, quite frankly, to evaluate a lot of these things. And so it remains to be seen whether or not what Microsoft has is unique, or if it's candidly stepping on patents or techniques or technologies that have already been deployed by many companies in the past.

ChannelWeb: So, at this point, it's still too early to know for sure. . . .

Thompson: Yeah, I mean until there is some assertion by them or someone else about someone violating their patent, I just think it's interesting chatter. That's all it is: chatter.

ChannelWeb: Symantec paid $350 million for Vontu for its data loss prevention technology. But as you look at the market, the technology seems to be starting to get commoditized. I was wondering. . . .

Thompson: Au contraire. . . .

ChannelWeb: You don't agree with me?

Thompson: Vontu's approach to DLP (data loss prevention) is quite different that (that of) anyone else who is in the space. Arguably, one of the technologies that gets used for DLP is encryption. That clearly isn't what Vontu does. By contrast, what Vontu does is, it looks at the actual content and allows you to build specific policies around the content specific content that you want to protect.

So let's give an example. Let's assume you have a set of statistical drawings or set of documents that were very, very sensitive or had watermarks that are legends on (the documents). You could define through your policy that any time that a document or legend or watermark or image is either stored in an endpoint, stored on the network, or stored in a storage array, I want to know where it is. And I want to be able to control the flow of that because it's either proprietary or sensitive or important to the company. There's no other technology in the marketplace like that. We believe that, as security as evolved, you have to move the concepts of protection closer and closer to the actual content itself. [Vontu] understands the specific content of a data stream, and you can put policies around it about how you want to control it. It gives you a much more granular level of protection.

ChannelWeb: What about competition for it?

Thompson: There is no similar approach to data loss prevention. EMC (Corp., Hopkinton, Mass.) bought a firm called Tablus. McAfee (Inc., Santa Clara, Calif.) bought something called Onigma. It's been an "enigma" to us. I haven't seen it since they bought it. WebSense (Inc., San Diego, Calif.) bought a little company. And each of these little companies, because it is a new area, have taken a slightly different approach.

We just happen to think, from the diligence work that we did, with customers in particular, that customers were truly, truly impressed with Vontu's capabilities. And more of them were deploying that than any other solution for data loss protection.

ChannelWeb: Symantec's Endpoint 11 seems like a complete overhaul aimed at fixing the performance of previous versions. Has it succeeded?

Thompson: In the first two quarters after availability, we shipped more than 40 million endpoints. And it was truly a complete rewrite of our endpoint protection approach, to go from five or six agents down to one. [Customers] want granular-level protection without the overhead and performance degradations that are associated with running multiple agents. The want the ease of manageability and deployment of a single agent versus multiple agents. Symantec Endpoint 11 gives them all of what they want, plus better manageability, better performance, and an approach to deploying network admission control without having to deploy yet another agent on the device.

ChannelWeb: The biggest acquisition Symantec did was Veritas. How has the integration of security and management progressed? It seems like we're still. . . .

Thompson: That's a really good question. I think when we did that, people thought, aw, sheesh, this is the craziest thing we every heard of. Now, page forward three years, and guess what? Our Backup Exec product has integrated within it our ThreatCon alerting capabilities, so as the threat level escalates or rises you'll be able to more frequently back up data. Now why is that important? Well, if you did a backup today versus a week ago, or an hour ago versus a day ago, the recovery time is one heck of a lot faster. And therefore it gets customers back on line a lot faster.

Concepts like data loss prevention were not at all on the radar screen for people three years ago. Well, guess what? Data loss prevention is [now] a very critical element of how customers layer security technologies onto their environment.

Security's always been about layering. In the 2003 to 2004 time frame, people thought layering was about firewalls, intrusion sensors, anti-virus agents. And what they've come to learn is, those technologies are necessary, but not sufficient. Now what you need are technologies that get closer and closer and closer to the data itself, where it's being used, where it's being stored, how it's being managed.

Well, we happen to manage 50 percent of the world's stored digital content. Our products, Backup Exec and NetBackup, lead the marketplace with almost a 50-percent share. You don't think we have better insight into how to protect and secure than someone else? I think we do.

ChannelWeb: In addition to Symantec's acquisition of Veritas, we also saw EMC's acquisition of RSA. . . .

Thompson: Yeah. . . .

Next: Contrast Moves Symantec Versus EMC

1 | 2 | Next >>

Tweet

   

More Security

Comments by Vanilla