The Hague, 09 Oct 2008
Symantec sees a number of trends changing the face of security and data management. John Thompson, chairman and CEO of Symantec, highlighted these trends at the company's Vision and ManageFusion EMEA 2008 conference, in The Hague, this week.
"As I travel around the word, there is one thing I hear from customers: they need to be much more effective managing and securing their data," said Thompson.
"Every two years, the amount of stored data doubles and that is a huge management and security challenge. The number of bytes of data stored will soon rival the number of grains of sand on all the world's beaches."
Thompson said it wasn't sufficient for companies to think about today's problems, but that they needed to position themselves effectively for the future.
"We think there are a number of important trends," he said. "The first is the transition from tape to disk-based storage management. That will take labour and time to perform, but it will speed up backups and improve uptime. The second is that security models must change to a more risk-based approach that is more information-centric. Seventy percent of threats are now about stealing confidential information and so data classification will become more critical.
“The third is governance. Governance is currently driving enterprise-wide solutions and the risk posture of organisations, but the upside is that those who have mature approaches to IT management and risk will support their customers and shareholders better."
He said the 'consumerisation' of IT would also require proper risk management.
"When I worked at IBM, I was told 'this is how you work' and I answered 'Yes sir, how fast?' Today's employee says 'here's how I compute, now you must align your network to how I work'. Companies will need to balance risk mitigation with how to allow the new generation of employees to work effectively."
Thompson said the final trend was the move to greener IT.
"IT's second largest cost is energy. If you can apply technologies to do consolidation, you can improve responsiveness. What you need is a set of solutions to reduce both the footprint of your servers and cooling and managing them."
Vision and ManageFusion EMEA 2008 is Symantec's user and partner summit which has been combined for the first time this year.
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