Johannesburg, 15 Oct 2010
Symantec Corp (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that small and medium-sized organisations across the globe can now deploy comprehensive security for their computer systems without the need for additional hardware or management software.
Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection will allow customers to protect their Windows-based laptops, desktops, and file servers from the proliferation and growing sophistication of threats, with the simplicity and convenience of a cloud-based service.
“Customers often experience pain when increased IT resources are required to stay abreast of evolving endpoint threats,” said Christian Christiansen, VP of Security Products and Services, IDC. “To reduce these difficulties, customers want turnkey, endpoint solutions that provide the latest protection levels with easy set-up, zero maintenance, and automatic upgrades. Security SaaS implementations can fully provide these solutions.”
Harnessing more than 18 years of experience developing award-winning technologies for anti-virus and endpoint protection, Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection is designed to safeguard endpoint systems with a single solution managed from a Web-based console offering advanced protection from the endpoint to the gateway.
“As the hosted model for messaging security has become increasingly popular for its ease of management and deployment, organisations are similarly motivated by the reduced complexity that cloud-based services can offer while effectively protecting their endpoint systems,” said Gordon Love, regional director for Africa, Symantec. “Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection leverages our SaaS expertise to deliver advanced technologies that help protect customer systems without requiring additional hardware, management software, or dedicated IT staffing.”
As threats become more complex and the global workforce increasingly more mobile, analysts have predicted that businesses will demand highly effective security solutions that are easy to set up and require minimal maintenance - features especially important to small and medium sized businesses that have limited resources to stay current with evolving security requirements, while managing a myriad additional IT responsibilities.
“A growing number of our clients have central offices with a largely distributed workforce that is either on the road or working from branch offices located across EMEA,” said Finian Nally, Technical Director, E-MIT Solutions, a Dublin-based provider of IT Consultancy and Management services to SMEs. “With Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection, we have visibility into the health of end-user systems and know that their protection levels are current and meet their corporate security requirements, regardless of whether they are logged into the network. This part of the workforce is often more difficult to monitor so the ability to manage these distributed systems from a single management console makes our lives much easier and also cuts costs for our clients.”
In addition to Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection, recent enhancements to the MessageLabs Web Security Service roaming support options will allow organisations to monitor and secure the online activity of a highly distributed workforce.
Drawing on ten years of securing corporate networks in the cloud, the MessageLabs Hosted Web Security Service offers enhanced roaming and remote worker support options to help organisations secure and enforce proper Web use in numerous environments.
SmartConnect for MessageLabs Hosted Web Security protects against malware, enforces Web acceptable usage policies for roaming users and detects geographic location for optimal service performance. RemoteConnect for MessageLabs Hosted Web Security protects and enforces Web acceptable use policies for tele-workers or employees at remote offices.
Virtually all workers with a laptop are becoming roaming workers, regardless of where they spend their time between 9am and 5pm,” said Rowan Trollope.
“Employees are more commonly migrating over numerous network environments and geographic locations, presenting IT with the challenge of enforcing usage policies, ensuring the protection of laptops and other endpoints and safeguarding employee communications.”
According to Forrester [1], telecommuting is accelerating the transition to cloud-based computing solutions, which are effective for highly distributed organisations. A cloud-based delivery model streamlines the process of provisioning remote workers over the Internet, and provides IT organisations with greater visibility and control over corporate assets.
“In the past, our users were able to bypass our proxy server and corporate firewall,” said Chris Buckley, Infrastructure Team Lead, ASCO, a leading international oil and gas logistics company with operations in the UK, Norway, Holland, the US, Canada, Trinidad, Singapore and the Caspian. “We had no way to easily roll out group policies or to be sure that users were protected when they travelled. Now with Smart Connect, I know our users are secured no matter their location, and that my user and group Web policies are being consistently applied across the organisation.”
Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection, SmartConnect and RemoteConnect are available now to customers worldwide. Smart Connect and Remote Connect make use of a single policy engine, allowing the services to be easily combined for centralised reporting, Web policy management and configuration using a single Web-based portal.
Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection leverages Ubiquity, an award-winning next-generation security technology from Symantec, built on community-based reputation for fighting the newest malware attacks. Ubiquity enables Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection to harness the anonymous software usage patterns of more than 100 million contributing Symantec customers to deliver protection against the latest micro-distributed mutating threats, which would otherwise completely evade traditional security solutions.
Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection can be purchased on its own or in combination with other Symantec Hosted Services across e-mail, Web and IM. The service is currently available in English.
To sign up for a free trial, visit http://www.messagelabs.com/trials/hep.
Symantec Hosted Endpoint Protection is part of a broad portfolio of flexible endpoint security protection solutions for SME customers, including the Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition and Symantec Protection Suite Small Business Edition, Symantec Protection Suite Advanced Business Edition. Customers who are not yet ready to make the transition to SaaS can continue to rely on Symantec's award winning SME security portfolio.
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