CA Southern Africa driving Symantec Enterprise Cloud in SA’s enterprise sector

Michael Brink, CTO, CA Southern Africa.

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CA Southern Africa, a representative of Broadcom Software, is driving the Symantec Enterprise Cloud (SEC) into SA’s enterprise market.

SEC is a consolidated hybrid-cloud solution offering data and threat protection backed by the worldwide network of Symantec Security Operations Centres. It is a superset of the secure service edge (SASE) that incorporates zero trust principles and is an end-to-end security solution for the most complex and extensive enterprise networks. SEC forms the latest round of Symantec innovations.

“Since its acquisition by Broadcom in 2019, Symantec Enterprise has continued to refine and integrate key security technologies, along with re-platforming its entire security offering on Google Cloud infrastructure and increasing its R&D spending,” says Michael Brink, CTO CA Southern Africa.

“Symantec innovates business processes that are designed to meet the requirements of large, distributed customers. Working with governments, regulators and standards organisations, Symantec innovates and shapes technologies on a global scale. It is bringing these technologies together with SEC – a comprehensive offering designed to deliver data-centric, cross-platform security for large enterprises,” says Brink.

• Consolidation: Multiple endpoint agents drain client resources, add complexity and increase costs. SEC’s single agent for all endpoints – laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, servers and cloud workloads – stops agent sprawl, reduces complexity and gives managers a single view across all endpoints. Consolidated with the Cloud Secure Web Gateway, the agent provides both endpoint and network security to roaming endpoints.

• Hybrid cloud: Many organisations must maintain corporate data centres for business, legal or regulatory reasons. “In this instance, their cloud migration will always be to a hybrid cloud environment. For them, SEC can be deployed as a single entity spanning on-premises and cloud environments, with unified management of both. Alternatively, it can be deployed as a 100% on-premises solution – with an enforcement point; or as an entirely cloud-based implementation with the enforcement point in the cloud,” says Brink.

• Data and threat protection together: SEC combines data loss prevention (DLP) to protect data crossing networks, gateways and endpoints, with threat protection to identify and mitigate attacks. Threat detection capabilities are fed by Symantec threat hunting teams and the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, which uses artificial intelligence to distil over nine petabytes of data into actionable threat information.

• SOC integration: Integration among cyber security tools allows a team of highly skilled threat hunting specialists to evaluate information, discern patterns, block attacks and engage with customers to augment their SOC operations.

• Compliance: SEC applies and manages compliance controls consistently across organisations. A single governance team can manage data risk and perform audits from one platform, on-premises or in the cloud.

• SSE: Support for secure service edge (SSE) is part Symantec’s hybrid capable, data-centric security architecture.

Brink concludes that SEC represents an exciting prospect for SA’s enterprise sector especially when augmented by CA Southern Africa’s team of incomparably experienced and skilled technology professionals.