On the product and service delivery side of things, the company was eager to confirm that internal integration issues following the coming together of Symantec and Veritas could be consigned to the past, and are no longer considered by senior management to have any impact on future progress.

Some of this ‘bright new day’ vision conflicted slightly with some of Symantec’s own performance information, but, as ever, why should statistics be allowed to spoil a good story? For the security team, managing IT risk was put forward as the key theme of its latest Security 2.0 approach, with head of Security and Data Management Group Jeremy Burton focusing on three key areas for enterprise security.

The three key themes this year were: Security Foundation, which covers the company’s approach to providing real-time defense to lock-down levels for all end-point systems; Information Security, which provides equivalent lock-down capabilities for information; and Security Management, to provide an enterprise-wide view of systems, information, events, and logs, with the role of linking in policy and compliance requirements.

At a slightly more detailed level, Symantec’s Security 2.0 initiative is not being pitched as yet another unified threat management (UTM) model. This is because UTM, which is often seen as a hardware-based appliance approach, for obvious and well-publicized reasons (Symantec is a software-driven security company) cannot find favor here. However, Symantec Security Foundation (end-point protection) will provide a single administration console approach to the delivery of client anti-virus (AV), firewall, intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS and IPS), anti-spyware, behavior blocking, and device blocking.

The solution’s server agent will provide cross-platform host IDS and IPS, plus unified administration for servers, desktops, laptops, and other mobile devices. On the information security side, Symantec is categorizing its range of protection services into three key areas: messaging – email, instant messaging (IM), and voice; files and content – documents, video, images, and others; and structured data – relational databases for core applications such as ERP, and CRM.

Across the board, it is looking to provide integrated protection against incursions from elements such as worm, spam, and phishing attacks, employee misconduct, IP theft and information leakage, customer data privacy violations, and against the loss of business records that should have been retained. Finally, pulling Symantec’s Security 2.0 initiative together, the company’s security management offering will provide enterprise organizations with software that manages all security incidents, and will link responses through to the risk, policy, and compliance requirements of the organization.

At the same time as increasing the company’s focus on the provision of integrated protection solutions for the enterprise, Symantec did not forget to remind us all that it has an ongoing commitment to its bread-and-butter consumers and small to medium business (SMB) markets, putting out an announcement that highlighted its ongoing approach to dealing with information access and security within SMB environments.

Security 2.0 is being pitched as the way forward for Symantec. Much of the technology already exists, although some elements such as IM and voice components of the messaging offering sit within the 2007 roadmap, along with fascinatingly named projects, Hamlet and FQP. It looks like 2007 will once again be an interesting year for Symantec. Its Safetytown band may fail to reach the higher echelons of the album charts, but with the now regular incursions into the security space from large enterprise software vendors, Symantec will need to be on top form to head up the security sector.

Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)