Blurring lines between consumers, enterprises

This post originally appeared in Pradeep Chakraborty's Blog!

Consumers today are embracing a digital lifestyle and enterprises are getting connected in new ways as well. “The lines are blurring between the consumer and the enterprise. We are also now more closely integrated with our business partners,” said Enrique Salem, Group President, Worldwide Sales & Marketing, Symantec, while
delivering his keynote at the recently held Symantec Vision in Mumbai.

He added that India is one of the most vibrant markets in the world. The Symantec Vision events allow users to get hands-on experience some of the best technologies and best practices, etc.

“As we do more activities online, our systems also need to be performing. Information protection is now a large area of interest. We also need to manage the performace risk. There is another ‘S’ of our business — storage. Storage has been growing at 60 percent per year. Utilization has been low — 33 percent. We are storing information over and over again. There are also problems in space, power and cooling,” he added.

Storage United
There has been a lot of platform proliferation. Islands are getting created for all sorts of different applications. Hence, there is an administration problem, leading up to a business problem. There is clearly a gap between what IT teams are required to deliver and what businesses want. To address this very need, Symantec introduced Storage United.

Salem noted: "We have united all platforms — this allows a common way of managing and looking at it. It allows a common storage platform and also allows us to deliver storage-as-a-service. We are also seeing a shift from tape to hard disk storage. We also have market leading products in the areas of data protection. We also have Enterprise Vault — the only leading technology in the archiving space, as per Gartner.”

Security 1.0 to 2.0
According to Enrique Salem, security itself has moved from 1.0 to 2.0 as well. It is now an enabler, and has moved from point security solutions to operationalized security. Next, vulnerability based exploits have become people-based exploits. Lastly, from infrastructure focus, it has shifted to information focus.

Salem said: “We have an integrated portfolio to protect businesses and information — Policy Management, Information Foundation and Endpoint Security. We also offer consulting services, managed services and the largest intelligence network. Twenty five percent of global emails go through our gateways.”

The Information Foundation 2007, which reduces the risk of external threats, prevents data loss, and allows integrated content archiving and e-discovery. The Endpoint Security delivers advanced protection. It comes in a single console, with smaller footprint.

He concluded that: “Customers want confidence. Symantec ensures that your information is effectively protected, the infrastructure is protected, and interaction using different devices will also be protected.”