VISION 2005: What Has Symantec Got Up Its Sleeve?

After its recent tie-up with Veritas earlier in June, 2005, Symantec
organized its first big international event-Vision 2005 at Mumbai on October
25, 2005. Veritas used to organize this event every year before the merger as
well. Last year, the event was attended by approximately 700 people, but this
time around, nearly 2,000 participants were present.

Other than presenting the visionary awards to Symantec customers in various
fields, the event released the IDC survey on security threats faced by the
mid-sized enterprise sector. Besides this, the company also introduced its two
new products-Backup Exec 10d for Windows Server and new additions to its
LifeStave family of Windows server and desktop infrastructure management
solutions.

TAKING CHARGE: Vishal Dhupar, the newly appointed MD of Symantec, is geared up to take the twin offerings of Veritas and Symantec to the channel community

Five Symantec customers were awarded the Visionary awards for their excellent
performance in various categories. The award winners were HDFC bank for Data
Protection, Punjab National Bank for Information Security, Tata Consultancy
Services for High Availability, ICICI Bank for Server and Storage Utilization
and Bharti Tele-Ventures for Data Replication. All these companies have met the
various challenges associated with the corporate segment today.

Speaking at the awards ceremony, Steven Leonard, Senior VP, Symantec, Asia
Pacific and Japan said, "Symantec's business is to help customers
leverage technology to address critical issues and these progressive
organizations have done a commendable task for their innovative use of
technology."

Virus threats: A major concern

Various studies conducted for the mid-sized companies by IDC revealed that
recently virus threats have grown to a large extent and 20% of such companies
have expressed a major concern for the security and data protection. 63% of the
companies, with an average number of 267 employees and the turnovers ranging
between 26 crore to 100 crore, face security threat through virus coming from
Internet and emails.

It is surprising that in spite of the increasing threats in security issues,
there are still a large number of mid-sized companies, who are not using any
type of security solutions yet for various reasons. The most common reason,
which is dissuading these companies from deploying security solutions, is the
high installation costs.

TAKING CHARGE: Vishal Dhupar, the newly appointed MD of Symantec, is geared up to take the twin offerings of Veritas and Symantec to the channel community

Speaking about the appalling costs, Parijat Chakraborty, Senior Manager,
User and Communication Research, IDC (India) said, "It is true that there
are issues of costs while implementing a security solution. But the mid-sized
corporate needs to understand that if there is any virus attack, then the
hassles in terms of costs and management can be far more."

Parijat also mentioned that mid-sized companies in Delhi have comparatively
better awareness about the security issues with 93% of the companies having a
definite security policy. Mumbai and Chennai follow this, where 63% and 62% of
the companies have security policy respectively. The IDC report also revealed
that in the mid-sized corporate sector, Symantec almost captured 68% of the
entire market and lagging far behind in the second position is McAfee, with 11%
presence.

Why security threats are on a rise?

The main reasons for an increase in security threats, according to Dean
Turner, Executive Editor, Symantec Internet Security Threat Report include the
attackers being motivated by financial gain, failings in the traditional
perimeter defenses like firewall and the increase in the volume and severity of
the attacks. Referring to the half yearly tenure from January to June, he said,
"Presently security attacks are being increasingly targeted. The attackers
are mainly aiming through the web applications and browsers."

Dean said that in the present study, Symantec has noticed that the affected
machines have increased by 143% and overall Symantec now attends to 10,352 such
machines every day. Compared to the other countries, the United Kingdom is the
worst affected with an average number of bot affected machines rising to 927 per
day.

Among the web browsers, Mozilla browsers are more vulnerable to the security
threats, where nearly 72% machines are attacked. Internet Explorer follows it
closely, where 62% of machines are attacked. Dean informed, "Among the
Internet security attacks, we have observed that most of the machines were
affected through mass mailing worms. The most popular worm in this category is
Netsky P," he stated. He also revealed a startling fact that recently
Symantec has discovered 10,866 new worms, which means that the release of the
new worms are now up by 48% in compared to the last survey period.

Reliance on Internet on rise

Another starting fact was revealed by Mark Read, Technology Specialist-
Microsoft Platform, Asia Pacific/ Japan, Symantec. He said, "The hard
reality is that today 60% of the emails we receive are spams and the main
concern for any corporate is that 75% of the company's intellectual property
is contained in emails. It is also a fact that now with the expansion of
geographical boundaries, 79% of the companies accept email as a written
approval."

When Ajei Gopal, Senior VP, APJ, Symantec Corporation was asked that in such
a vulnerable situation, what will be the steps of Symantec to motivate more and
more companies to use the security solutions, he said, "We have regular
campaigns, where we educate our partners and other companies about the necessity
of using a security solution. We would continue with these types of similar
programs in future also."

While the security threats do not show any sign of diminishing, what is
heartening to notice is that vendors like Symantec are making a concentrated
effort to educate their partners and customers on how best to safeguard
themselves. This will work out as a mutually beneficial arrangement for all
concerned-Symantec, its partners and their customers.

SHILPI DAS in Mumbai