Cloud and Virtualisation Drive Businesses Transformation

News Release

Mobility, Cloud and Virtualisation Drive Businesses Transformation

Symantec welcomes an estimated 1,000 customers and partners to its annual user conference in Sydney

Symantec today welcomed an estimated 1,000 customers and partners to Symantec Vision, its annual user conference, in Sydney. Themed ‘Surround Yourself’ the one-day event provided customers and partners with a forum to hear about Symantec’s strategy and vision, learn about industry trends they can leverage, as well as build relationships, network and exchange ideas with Symantec executives and industry peers.

Angela Tucci, Symantec senior vice president and chief strategy officer, delivered the keynote speech together with Craig Scroggie, Symantec vice president and managing director for the Pacific region. Angela and Craig identified the trends in mobility, cloud and virtualisation that are driving IT transformation. They also took the opportunity to outline how Symantec is enabling customers and partners to benefit from these trends.

“IT trends in mobile, cloud and virtualisations are driving increased connectivity on an unprecedented scale. These connections are creating greater opportunities and greater points of risk; risk to our intellectual property, financial integrity, corporate reputation, the control of our individual and corporate identities, privacy and even national infrastructures,” said Angela Tucci, senior vice president and chief strategy officer, Symantec. “Without the promise of protection, the connected world will not reach its full potential. By embracing the IT trends, we move from siloed environments ruled by limited mobility, closed platforms and walls built to restrict the flow of information – to a new connected world.”

Mobile, Cloud and Virtualisation in the Interaction Era

With rapid advances in mobile, cloud and virtualisation technologies, today’s modern business interacts with employees, customers and third parties in many diverse ways. This new interaction era is presenting IT security challenges for businesses.

According to the Symantec State of Security Study 2011, two-thirds of surveyed businesses in Australia and New Zealand have experienced a cyber attack in the past 12 months and as a result many have experienced downtime, and lost intellectual property or other corporate and financial data. In addition, IT executives identified security as a leading business risk they face, ahead of traditional crime, natural disasters and terrorism. However the survey revealed that while the majority of respondents suffered damages as a result of cyberattacks, more respondents reported a decline in the number and frequency of attacks compared to 2010.

“While businesses are getting better at fighting the war against cybersecurity threats, they are now grappling with the challenge of securing the influx of personal devices into the workplace and controlling the flow of information. Smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices are interacting with company networks, whether it is permitted by the IT administrator or not,” said Craig Scroggie, vice president and managing director, Pacific region, Symantec.

The explosion of connectivity brings the promise of increased productivity, but at the cost of a greater risk of exposure. Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report found 43 percent more mobile vulnerabilities in 2010 compared with 2009 – a sign that cybercriminals are starting to focus their efforts on the mobile space.

“The proliferation of mobile devices and prevalence of malware on mobile devices highlights that the protection of sensitive data needs to be top of mind for businesses. This is why Symantec focuses on what matters most – information. By ensuring that our customers have private, secure and simple access to information – anywhere, anytime, anyhow, we can empower them to take advantage of today’s connected environment,” said Craig Scroggie, vice president and managing director, Pacific region, Symantec.

In addition, public and private clouds are becoming more mainstream with businesses regarding cloud as no longer an ‘if’, but a ‘when’. Symantec is helping customers overcome the obstacles of moving to the cloud by streamlining security, compliance and availability requirements and is extending its lead in the cloud space by delivering storage optimisation and storage-as-a-service solutions.

Symantec will soon announce a major refresh to its storage and availability management portfolio to help customers build the private cloud they want by leveraging their existing infrastructure. Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 will provide resiliency for the private cloud with its virtual business service capabilities which orchestrate, automate, and simplify the recovery of multi-tiered applications across different operating systems and virtualisation platforms. Storage Foundation High Availability 6.0 will also help IT organisations manage and deliver storage as a service – optimised for physical, virtual, and cloud environments – by providing the ability to scale storage capacity up or down while applications remain online and reducing storage footprint through deduplication, compression, and thin reclamation for primary storage.

Virtualisation is a maturing technology that continues to find new applications in IT infrastructure. Symantec is developing advanced backup and storage management solutions that tame the data explosion, significantly lower total cost of ownership and enable customers to fully virtualise critical infrastructure with confidence, even in the cloud.

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