Mark Bregman, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Offcer, Symantec Corporation says that SaaS has the potential to be a game changer. In a conversation with Ashwani Mishra, Bregman talks about the company’s strategy in the security and storage areas and how it plans to deliver best solutions to its customers.
Q:How is Symantec dynamically changing its product portfolio to deal with all the issues related to security? In other words, Symantec, like many other large software vendors, wants to have an end-to-end, integrated stack to manage infrastructure. How do you plan to achieve this?A: In today’s times, information is more distributed than ever before. Our product portfolio focuses on an information-centric model for security and management. We innovate and integrate across our portfolio to enable our customers to secure and manage information.
The strength of our portfolio, combined with a focus on innovations, enables us to help customers succeed. The breadth and depth of security, storage and systems management technologies we offer allows us to innovate in unique ways and leverage integration points across our product portfolio.
Organizations today face a rapidly evolving range of threats related to information security from organized criminals as well as malicious insiders. So it is important to take a proactive, risk-based evolving range of threats related to information security from organized criminals as well as malicious insiders. So it is important to take a proactive, risk-based approach that protects not only the infrastructure, but also the information that resides on it.
Enterprises face many challenges in reducing risk and ensuring that data is protected at all times, regardless of where it is used or stored. Our strategy is to help companies protect their infrastructure, protect their information, develop and enforce IT policies and manage their systems.
A: For a vast majority of organizations, the transition to the cloud will be a gradual movement of applications, services, and approach that protects not only the infrastructure, but also the information that resides on it.
Enterprises face many challenges in reducing risk and ensuring that data is protected at all times, regardless of where it is used or stored. Our strategy is to help companies protect their infrastructure, protect their information, develop and enforce IT policies and manage their systems.
According to a recent Symantec report, staffing, cloud computing and IT compliance have been ranked as the top enterprise security challenges this year? How can enterprises tackle these challenges now and in the coming years? For a vast majority of organizations, the transition to the cloud will be a gradual movement of applications, services, and supporting infrastructure into the cloud. We plan to enable customers at all stages of this transition.
Today we offer choice and flexibility in the adoption of our solutions to secure and manage information in the cloud. We are helping customers capitalize on the promise of cloud computing in four ways.
These include providing hosted services to businesses and consumers, enabling enterprises to build their own private cloud infrastructures with our software and services, offering cloudready Symantec software through third party loud-infrastructure providers and offering consulting services for cloud strategy development.
To tackle the IT compliance challenges, organizations need to develop and enforce IT policies and automate their compliance processes. By prioritizing risks and defining policies that span across all locations,customers can enforce policies through built-in automation and workflow. They can identify threats and remediate incidents as they occur or anticipate them before they happen.
A: SaaS has the potential to be a game changer and we are well-positioned to expand its position in the market space. Symantec Hosted Services now covers more than nine million end users from 21,000 organisations spanning across 100 countries. More than nine million consumers are using Symantec SaaS offerings through Norton Online Backup.
Q:What would be your strategy on the storage front for the next couple of years?A: Symantec’s storage strategy supports our information-centric focus and includes several efforts. First, we will continue to enable our customers to commoditize their infrastructure, and standardize on software that supports major operating systems, storage platforms, databases and applications.
We will also look at ways to help our customers build scalable, high-performance file-based storage systems for their enterprise, including their private and public clouds, using our FileStore technology.
Our strategy will also include efforts to innovate and integrate across our storage and security portfolio using new technologies such as Data Insight to help customers improve data governance and gain insight into the ownership and usage of information. Innovations such as Data Insight are aimed at aligning enterprise information assets to business goals by simplifying the remediation of exposed critical data and optimizing their storage environment.