Symantec Vision: Where Storage Will Meet Security

“People are recognizing the linkage between storage and data,” said Jeremy Burton, senior vice president of enterprise security and data management at Symantec, who expects security partners to comprise between 10 percent and 20 percent of the attendees at the event.

Management of e-mail, instant messaging and IT compliance are central to Symantec’s strategy and will be the main areas of focus at Vision, according to Burton. Symantec, Cupertino, Calif., also will discuss plans to integrate its IM Manager and Mail Security products, as well as unified policy management aimed at helping companies keep log files of interactions to reduce potential liability from litigation, said Burton.

“It makes sense to have a unified policy management approach across IM and e-mail, and at a later point in time across the archiving products as well,” Burton said. “The big picture is, we want to manage data flowing back and forth between these systems.”

Brian Okun, director of marketing at Chips Computer Consulting, a solution provider in Lake Success, N.Y., partnered with both vendors prior to the merger. “Symantec is making the transition from a product-centric company to a solutions-oriented company, and they are aligning their partners with that same culture,” said Okun.

Symantec has been in the business of the security of exclusion, or protecting from outside threats, but plans are to increase focus on solutions that guard against threats from within companies, Burton added.

“If you have an employee engaging in fraudulent activity, how do you stop it? You have to monitor and have some kind of surveillance capability, which is easier if you have access to the data. We are looking to provide a platform so that data movement can be monitored,” said Burton.

IT departments are under pressure to demonstrate security policy compliance, and Burton says Symantec will continue to integrate technology from last year’s acquisition of network access control vendor Sygate. “End-point compliance is the name of the game now, and it’s a big thing we will hammer on from a security standpoint,” said Burton.

From a security and storage perspective, there are definitely going to be partners capable of supporting entire solution sets from Symantec, Okun said. For example, Okun has seen “phenomenal growth” in LiveState Recovery coupled with Backup Exec, and it’s now possible to run Backup Exec jobs from the LiveState management console.

“There will be partners selling across the entire Symantec product line,” Okun said, “but there will still be opportunities for partners to differentiate themselves along one specialty.”