Symantec Tests Security Appliance

This week, the Cupertino, Calif., security vendor will begin beta testing a new appliance dubbed Symantec Security Information Manager 9500, a dedicated tool for collecting security alert information and correlating it against known threats. The full-fledged commercial release is slated for September, executives said.

The hardware will integrate with the Symantec Enterprise Security Manager 6.5, which scans users' IT infrastructures to help thwart possible compliance issues.

Al Mazlowski-Yerges, practice manager for security at Novacoast, a Symantec partner in Santa Barbara, Calif., said the new appliance represents a serious improvement over Symantec's existing security management offerings. He welcomes not only the promise of improved bandwidth and scalability, but also the integration of the product's correlation engine with the DeepSight Threat Management System. The latter, which enterprise VARs will be able to sell as a managed service along with the appliances, promises to bring sharper context to reams of security event information, he said.

"It's been a problem for a long time that you get Gigabytes and Gigabytes of logs," Mazlowski-Yerges said.

Rowan Trollope, vice president of security management solutions at Symantec, said the appliance will address the complexity of point security products and provide the ability to respond quickly to compliance requirements.

Products in the forthcoming Security Information Manager 9500 series capture, filter, aggregate, normalize and correlate alerts from both Symantec products and third-party products, said Ashesh Kamdar, product manager for the series. The appliance includes features for customizing data views and reports, and includes a tool for automating data purges and backups.

Pricing for the base level edition of Security Information Manager 9500, targeted at branch offices, starts at $39,000 retail, Kamdar said. The starting price for the enterprise-focused product, Security Information Manager 9550, is $59,000. Pricing scales depend on the number of systems being monitored, Kamdar said.