Mobility and Virtualisation Lead the Symantec Symposium in New Zealand
Tuesday 14 August 2012, 1:22PM
By Botica Butler Raudon Partners
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Today at the Symantec Symposium 2012 (NASDAQ:SYMC), Brenton Smith, vice president and managing director, Pacific Region Symantec, shared Symantec’s vision across today’s biggest trends such as virtualisation, mobile, cloud, big data and security.
As the Ultra Fast Broadband initiative is rolled out across New Zealand, Symantec expects to see a marked increase in the use of mobile devices. It’s estimated that 40 percent of professionals are using at least two mobile devices to access corporate networks and that number is expected to double by 2014. But with every major change in the way IT gets delivered, new threats are introduced and exploited by cybercriminals, causing many companies to be cautious about the future. According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, the number of mobile threats increased by 93 percent in 2011.
“The hottest trend in the industry right now is mobility,” said Smith. “Mobile devices are truly becoming first class citizens of corporate IT. They are being used for work more than ever before and corporate applications are not the only apps being accessed, as more and more employees use consumer mobile applications like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for business. Customers are also going to become an increasingly important part of the endpoint ecosystem.”
Symantec’s most recent State of Mobility survey found that 65 percent of businesses said data loss was one of their top concerns for mobile adoption. In addition, Symantec estimates that 60 percent of companies are already making line-of-business applications accessible from mobile devices.
“We believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice protection for productivity,” Smith continued. “Allowing employees to bring their own devices into the workplace and use them to access corporate networks and information does not mean you have to compromise on protection. Symantec protects you and your business’ information regardless of platform and we offer the best capabilities in mobile device and mobile application management to protect information on company and employee-owned devices.”
As with mobile devices, companies want to be able to take advantage of the productivity that comes with the cloud but are concerned about protection. To take advantage of the opportunities, businesses must be able to protect information across corporate and employee-owned devices as well as public and private infrastructure that may be a physical or virtual environment.
Today, most organisations have already virtualised some of their application workloads and plan to virtualise more. Virtualising business-critical applications delivers significant strategic benefits and is a key step toward a cloud model of IT service delivery.
But these applications also require provably high levels of security, resiliency, performance, and operational efficiency. Symantec solutions for business-critical virtualisation are optimised for all leading virtualisation platforms, and provide the advanced security, availability, and storage management capabilities required to virtualise business-critical applications with confidence.
“Yesterday’s solutions won’t completely protect your company today,” added Smith. “Through innovation and investment, we now offer one of the broadest solutions to truly address today’s needs of the enterprise. Confidence ultimately means businesses having visibility and control of their information in the cloud. At Symantec, we’re focused on protecting people and information – whether it’s in the data centre on physical or virtual servers, structured in databases or in archives for long term storage and retention.”
Taking place in Auckland and Wellington, the Symantec Symposium featured keynote presentations from industry experts such as Brenton Smith, vice president and managing director, Pacific Region Symantec, Martin Cocker, executive director, NetSafe and Sean Kopelke, director, Strategic Solutions, Pacific, Symantec. The event is sponsored by Dell, Red Hat and Insight. More information about the 2012 Symantec Symposium can be found here.