“Symantec is actively engaged to offer global insights for policies that may shape India’s cyber future” Mr. Tarun Kaura, Director, Technology Sales, India, Symantec

Q. Detection of new security threats is a critical part of the overall security infrastructure. Tell us about the work that Symantec is doing in this area.

Ans: Traditional security solutions, although effective, only identify threats as they hit the enterprise making it essential for a security solutions provider to invest into a mechanism that helps customers stay ahead of time. Symantec being the leader in the security place thus have crafted an intelligence network called DeepSight Security Intelligence. Symantec’s team of security experts monitor the cyberspace 24X7 to detect threats in real-time and develop solutions for the same. Furthermore, we also issue alerts and warnings to our customers and the public at large through the media about current dangers and recommended defenses. We publish several threat reports and analysis to inform users and increase awareness about malicious threat activity and trends. Again through our Live Update technology we disseminate technology updates to our customers to ensure they are protected from the latest threats. So far our Global Intelligence Network has identified the following and contributed in securing the overall threat landscape worldwide:

• More than 13M attack sensors monitoring networks
• Over 60,000 vulnerabilities, covering over 19,000 vendors
• Visibility into all ports/protocols for threat analysis and collection
• More than 8.4 billion emails a day
• More than 1.7 billion web requests a day

Q. Apart from security, Symantec has been pushing storage, cloud and DR. How have you fared in these technology domains?

Ans: The explosion of Information for enterprises today has challenged the existing solutions deployed in enterprises and information management and storage plays an important role to manage information efficiently and ensure that the data is not leaked or lost. Today, organizations often store their information on physical, virtual and cloud storage, Symantec has proven capabilities to be one amongst world’s leading players in the storage market. Symantec helps customers significantly by securing and managing information through solutions that maximize their storage efficiency, availability and performance across operating systems, virtualization technologies, and storage hardware to build resilient private clouds.

• In line with the needs of the market, Symantec has recently announced the latest version of Storage Foundation 6.1Cloud-based services have also seen traction in the Indian market due to reduced costs, flexibility and strong SLAs that guarantee a reduction in management overheadIndian organisations are also extensively adopting DR-as-a-Service. Keeping in mind the expenses and the negative implications downtime can have on a business, it is safe to say that DRaaS is a viable option for businesses of varying scales.
  • It enables data centers to leverage Solid State Drives (SSDs) in ways that allow customers to access mission critical data and applications 400 percent faster than traditional Storage Area Networks (SANs)
  • It is also the only offering to provide these benefits regardless of which hardware components or operating systems are in place. Customers as a result are free to choose any storage infrastructure provider, and businesses can make critical decisions faster.
• Symantec helps customers implement cost-effective, reliable disaster recovery options. We provide organizations around the world solutions to help protect data. To provide customers with reliable and cost-effective disaster recovery (DR) options, Symantec has created a disaster recovery solution that uses Windows Azure
  • The solution, which is built on Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation High Availability for Windows offering, can deliver a cost-effective, automated, and reliable way to reduce disaster recovery and complexity by moving many DR tasks to the cloud. The solution also makes disaster recovery options more affordable for small and medium-sized organizations.

Q. What is your outlook for the overall IT market? What are your channel plans for 2014?

Ans: It is our goal to be seen as a partner of choice for our channel partners in India. Our strategy to achieve this is through offering industry leading solutions that help customers address their needs around Information Security and Information Management. While we do this, we will also continue to help our partners achieve high profitable growth as well as focus on high class solution enablement leading to superior and sustained customer & partner experience. Simply put, our vision is focused on the following tenets:

• Partners are essential to our business and at the heart of Symantec’s core values
• We execute a shared, focused, and intentional strategy that encourages the right partners to provide the best possible customer experience.
• We recognize and reward our partners based on the value they provide.

Q. How do you identify the government installations that need the kind of cutting edge security that Symantec is in a position to provide?

Ans: Cyber security requires a multi-disciplinary approach, adopting best of breed technology, and global best practices to build a multi-layered defence. Symantec has worked closely with Governments all over the world in a variety of public-private partnerships following such kind of approach. Even with Indian government, Symantec is actively engaged to offer global insights for policies that may shape India’s cyber future. In an important region like India, Symantec is always working towards increasing awareness in policymakers about the probable pitfalls and challenges while ensuring that privacy remains intact.

 Q. What kind of evolution are you seeing in the adoption of virtualization?

Ans: Virtualization presents organizations with tremendous opportunities, as well as some significant challenges. This transformative technology provides the basis for the convergence of mobile and cloud computing, a convergence that is rapidly changing the face of IT as it enables enterprises to consolidate resources, improve responsiveness and support the business agility in a more cost effective manner than ever before.

Symantec’s 2011 Virtualization and Evolution to the Cloud Survey found adoption of server virtualization is widespread, with more than 75 percent of organizations discussing private and hybrid cloud deployments. Of the technologies evaluated in the survey, which examined how organizations plan to move business-critical initiatives to virtual and hybrid cloud computing environments, server and storage virtualization are the most mature with 45 and 43 percent of enterprises implementing, respectively.

The combination of virtualization, mobility, and cloud computing has triggered an explosion in the quantity of data being created, shared, and managed by enterprises. In addition, security and virtualization suites must be integrated for hybrid environments, so that a single console may be used to manage security across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. To meet the challenge of rapid provisioning, it will also be important that contextual security information be made available to non-traditional security staff, while maintaining established separations of duties and privileges.

Q. New Product Launches?

Ans: At Symantec we strive to introduce information security and management products that fight against the latest information management and security challenges. Recently Symantec has launched Storage Foundation 6.1 and Net Backup 7.6 keeping their vision to safeguard information and the modern datacenters from security threats.

Storage Foundation 6.1

Storage Foundation 6.1 is a new version of its Storage Foundation software that enables data centers to leverage Solid State Drives (SSDs) in ways that allow customers to access mission critical data and applications 400 percent faster than traditional Storage Area Networks (SANs). It is also the only offering to provide these benefits regardless of which hardware components or operating systems are in place. Customers as a result are free to choose any storage infrastructure provider, and businesses can make critical decisions faster.

Net Backup 7.6

NetBackup 7.6 is Symantec’s first proof point for the modern, software-defined data center – one that is agile, high performance and heterogeneous.

• Virtualization is the first step in moving to a software-defined data center. VMware is the leader in server virtualization, so we’re partnering with VMware to enable and protect software-defined data centers.
• Virtual sprawl and larger data center environments are making backup environments more complex, forcing IT administrators to spend too many resources on backup.
• As data centers become more reliant on virtualization solutions and data continues to grow, protection software must be automated and work at a larger scale and capacity, perform faster and integrate with VMware tasks so that IT can spend less time on backups within a stagnant or declining budget.

NetBackup is now 35X faster at backing up VMware, 400x faster for recovering VMware, and can backup 300VMs in 300 seconds in NetApp snapshot environments.