CA Southern Africa highlights Symantec innovation

Michael Brink, CTO, CA Southern Africa.

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CA Southern Africa, a representative of Broadcom Software and driving Symantec Enterprise Cloud (SEC) uptake in SA’s enterprise market, highlights Symantec’s five decades of innovation as a global cyber security leader with an incomparable record of accomplishment, CA Southern Africa says.

SEC is a consolidated hybrid cloud solution offering data and threat protection backed by the worldwide network of Symantec Security Operations Centres – it comprises a comprehensive offering designed to deliver data-centric, cross-platform security for large enterprises.

Broadcom’s acquisition of Symantec in 2019 reinforced a history of innovation focusing on areas most important to its global client base, including:

• Compliance – a major driver for large multinationals and growing fast as new regulatory authorities assert themselves and older ones fragment regionally.
• Integration – a priority for large companies any time, enhanced now by opportunities to integrate Symantec solutions with Broadcom ValueOps, AIOps and other enterprise software.
• Work-from-anywhere – an accomplished fact post-pandemic and a significant challenge to build a secure, productive user experience on top of infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it.

• Hybrid and multicloud environments – on-premises infrastructure remains out of fashion, but the global slowdown in cloud spend/adoption, together with the rising cloud costs, strengthens the case for multicloud, hybrid (on-premises) capabilities. Data residency and security concerns also keep most multinationals from going all-in to the cloud.

The period post the acquisition was one of the busiest, most productive and innovative in Symantec’s history as the company rebuilt its entire security infrastructure in the cloud to serve the needs of its global enterprise customers from the cloud at high performance levels.

Michael Brink, CTO at CA Southern Africa, says: “A SASE architecture delivers security services directly to devices at the network edge, eliminating the wasteful ‘touch base’ or hair-pinning – essentially backhauling or channelling all traffic from the cloud and back to the on-premises data centre for every transaction. But speed and latency still matter in the cloud: if the edge network is bandwidth-constrained or physically distant from a user’s device, latency will grow and performance will suffer.

"To drive these constraints to an absolute minimum, Broadcom Software rewrote and re-platformed its entire offering – more than 80 products and services, including all Symantec solutions – as cloud native, software as a service solutions on Google Cloud infrastructure, in containerised environments under Kubernetes orchestration.”

He adds that the strategic partnership with Google provides Broadcom and Symantec users the following advantages:

• Global range, interconnecting ISPs, content providers and users on a high-speed private network;

• Edge points of presence (POPs) on 180+ internet exchanges and at 160+ interconnection facilities worldwide, reducing costs and latency;

• Efficient routing on Google’s private backbone, minimising traffic over the public internet;

• Unmatched scale;
• Elasticity in response to unpredictable changes; and
• Stability and resilience in the face of disruptions.

“The enterprise sector in South Africa has a promising opportunity ahead with the support of CA Southern Africa's team of highly skilled and experienced technology professionals focused on enhancing the potential of the SEC offering,” concludes Brink.