Symantec organizes its security products in suites to address evolving risks

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In last week's newsletter, I provided insight from the Symantec Global Internet Security Threat Report: Trends for 2009.  . Through its extensive research, Symantec has observed that data security threats are becoming very targeted to specific companies, and even to specific people and information within those companies. Thieves want (and have the ability) to get at sensitive data that they can monetize quickly. Hackers are changing their techniques, using malware software that is as sophisticated as commercial software.

When I attended Symantec's annual user conference in April, I spoke with Francis deSouza, senior vice president of Symantec's Enterprise Security Group. He lamented, "When it comes to preventing cyberattacks and intellectual property theft, the game has completely changed." He says that companies have to get ahead of the threats by reducing their overall IT security risk, and "not just stopping the latest malware attack."

Data breach costs top $200 per customer record

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In last week's newsletter, I provided insight from the Symantec Global Internet Security Threat Report: Trends for 2009.  . Through its extensive research, Symantec has observed that data security threats are becoming very targeted to specific companies, and even to specific people and information within those companies. Thieves want (and have the ability) to get at sensitive data that they can monetize quickly. Hackers are changing their techniques, using malware software that is as sophisticated as commercial software.

When I attended Symantec's annual user conference in April, I spoke with Francis deSouza, senior vice president of Symantec's Enterprise Security Group. He lamented, "When it comes to preventing cyberattacks and intellectual property theft, the game has completely changed." He says that companies have to get ahead of the threats by reducing their overall IT security risk, and "not just stopping the latest malware attack."

Data breach costs top $200 per customer record

It's hard to see the problems associated with compliance, information protection, systems management and the network infrastructure at the same time and at a relevant enough level to effectuate appropriate and timely remediation -- in other words, to prevent a breach. So, the challenge is how to increase visibility into all of the network and supporting activities, and at the same time reduce the time from breach detection to mitigation, with the emphasis being on risk management and mitigation.

Over the past few years, Symantec has realigned its security technologies to manage these four problem areas. Symantec has four suites of tools that, taken together, help assure organizations can rapidly respond to the threats they encounter today and into the future. With this integration of point solutions, Symantec now can cover the control spectrum of a data center by unifying policy management on the front end through to unifying event management and auditing on the back end. Here's a look at the newly integrated suites:

Control and Compliance Suite -- CCS was enhanced in many ways to better enable organizations to develop and enforce IT policies, and give IT managers and security experts greater insight into a company's IT and compliance risks at a lower cost. In this latest release, Symantec added a few new significant bells and whistles:

* CCS now integrates with Symantec's Data Loss Prevention (DLP) suite to provide a clear view into where information resides within a company's data stores and who is accessing this data, therein further clarifying the risk posture of sensitive data.

* Vulnerability Manager is a new component to CCS that checks for more than 54,000 known vulnerabilities across the network devices, operating system, database and Web layers of a network. This tool will provide organizations with additional visibility into vulnerabilities across their networks to proactively prevent threats to critical assets by identifying vulnerabilities in an organization's most sensitive servers and Web-based applications.

Linda Musthaler is a principal analyst with Essential Solutions Corporation.