Symantec "Project Nextgen" to merge compliance tools
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(InfoWorld) - Symantec Corp. plans to integrate two of its compliance assessment products to make it easier for IT administrators to manage the software, a company executive said Thursday. Engineers at the company are working on integrating Symantec's Enterprise Security Manager and Control Compliance Suite, said Tom Kendra, president of Symantec's Security and Data Management group, speaking on a webcast of the company's annual financial analyst conference Thursday. The project, code-named "Nextgen," is expected to ship in 2008, or possibly even as soon as the end of the year, Kendra said. Symantec did not disclose many other details about Nextgen. "The real key with Nextgen is it will be combining agent and agentless technologies," according to a company spokesman. These compliance products are used to identify systems on the network that are misconfigured or that do not have the latest security patches. Control Compliance Suite can perform scans of the network without requiring the installation of "agent" software on the devices being scanned.
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The product, Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0, replaces the previous enterprise version, Symantec AntiVirus.
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In a curious decision on the part of a security software company, a white paper released today on the Symantec's Web site contains the address of an independent research paper which includes a demonstration of defeating PatchGuard, complete with source code, in an early Windows Vista beta.  The address comes by way of a 16-page reduction of Vista's security technologies.
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(Source: MKS) A look at how to bridge the gap between Development and IT Operations through unified change management - an approach to automate IT and software processes while uniting process frameworks such as ITIL, CMMI and CobiT, to better meet compliance goals, achieve higher levels of process maturity and improve productivity.
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Oracle has released tools using technology acquired with Stellent that can automate compliance with government regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
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Here is a comparison of Microsoft's Windows Live OneCare and upcoming products from Symantec and McAfee.
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Symantec is looking for beta testers for two of its newest products, Norton Internet Security 2008 and Norton AntiVirus 2008. Both are slated to ship later this year, but the company has opened up the beta process to iron out the bugs before its final release.
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TORONTO, Oct. 5 - Symantec Corp. has released its LiveState Recovery family of products. Three editions of the disk-based Symantec LiveState Recovery (formerly called Symantec V2i Protector) are available
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As malware threats and regulatory compliance demands continue to grow more complex, IT will become increasingly dependent on SaaS (software as a service) offerings that let them respond to problems faster while also saving money, according to top executives at the world's largest anti-malware vendors.In addition to continued adoption of managed security services delivered on- and off-site by professional consultants, IT customers will be able to resolve some of the problems they have with existing IT systems defense and compliance automation tools by shifting away from on-premise technologies in favor of adopting more hosted applications, vendor executives contend.While security technologies such as end-point protection suites and IDS (intrusion detection systems) will likely always require the use of software agents that reside on customers' devices and network infrastructure, vendor executives claim that a range of technologies, including exploit-prevention tools and compliance-monitoring filters, will gradually move to the SaaS model.As a result, providers such as McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro, among others, are already ramping up their SaaS portfolios to adapt to the shift."We believe that [SaaS] is the wave of future, and we already deal with the issue of updating tens of millions of machines remotely multiple times per day in multiple geographies. It's one of most complex things to do in all of technology, and one of the most impressive assets that I think we have," said David DeWalt, CEO of McAfee."IT budgets are not growing, but the threats and regulatory demands are, and customers are finding themselves thin on resources. SaaS will be a great way for businesses to save on infrastructure and maintenance costs while improving protection," said Jeff Hausman, Symantec's senior director of product management. "There's no question that the hosted model is growing dramatically."McAfee expects a SaaS transition over time Building on the infrastructure that vendors such as McAfee have already established to distribute anti-malware signatures and other product updates to their customers, the companies will add new SaaS offerings incrementally as customers warm up to the ideal.The security software providers themselves must also figure out the appropriate mix of on- and off-site tools, as well as refine pricing policies for the services over the next few years, CEO DeWalt said.However, DeWalt recognized that the process of designing and delivering SaaS products -- and selling customers on their benefits -- won't be achieved overnight. "It's a very complicated technology project, sometimes not even related to development of our own technology, but based on the IT infrastructure needed to deliver SaaS as effectively," he said. "We've learned a lot through our experiences building [anti-malware] products for the consumer and small-business markets, and we'll use those lessons to move into the SaaS business over time."As part of its move into SaaS, McAfee announced the acquisition of ScanAlert, a provider of hosted e-commerce Web site security services, for $51 million in October 2007. The company will consider additional deals in the area if there are targets that can aid in its development of the business, DeWalt said.Trend Micro, others see Intelligence in the cloud Along with e-mail filtering services -- one breed of security SaaS application that has already proven a hit with customers of companies such as Postini, which Google acquired for $625 million in July 2007 -- vendor executives contend that hosted tools used to provide end-point and network security management services will be among the first to find favor with IT and end-users.Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen said a growing number of the firm's small-business customers are already using its Remote Manager hosted tools to maintain configuration of their security programs and prevent their end-point systems from being altered by malware programs such as rootkits."We began quietly moving forward in this direction several years ago, but I believe 2008 will be a big year for SaaS development, not only because of vendor initiatives, but because of the need to deal with new threats among customers," Chen said."We think that there will be a need to move anti-threat knowledge from the customer into the cloud," Chen said. "Instead of having them download a virus pattern file, we will filter things and compare them to intelligence in the cloud, and then go to the end-user and update them without having to download the larger files used today."Keeping the channel involved Established SaaS applications in other markets, such as Salesforce.com's hosted sales-force automation tools, have traditionally bypassed resellers and other channel players and instead been provided directly to customers by vendors themselves. That may not be the case for SaaS-delivered anti-malware, Chen said.The reason? Even though SaaS tools are meant to alleviate many of the management concerns related to traditional on-premise products by handing the responsibilities back to the vendors, channel partners will be important in providing any services necessary to help users transition to the delivery model, or to customize the applications to individual business environments and provide any needed support services, Chen said.Symantec, which has pledged to turn as many of its products into SaaS offerings as it can do profitably, has also promised to keep its resellers in the loop as its brings new hosted services to market. Most customers adopting SaaS services will still consume traditional security products, leading the company to pursue a hybrid strategy that mixes the two disciplines, said product director Hausman."We have the infrastructure to provide the service, but resellers will still maintain a lot of the relationships," Hausman said. "We're the brand behind delivery to the customer, but the partner is still the same name and face that customers have grown comfortable dealing with over time."Diverse opportunities Symantec's maiden foray into SaaS is its Protection Network online secure backup service aimed initially at smaller customers, hundreds of which are already piloting the offering, according to Hausman. But Symantec is preparing several other hosted products for release.E-mail security is one area where Symantec sees SaaS opportunities, built on the success of acquired companies such as Postini. Other services that the company is pursuing might come as a surprise, including its bet that elements of DLP (data leakage prevention) and compliance monitoring can be moved to the SaaS delivery model.Vontu, the DLP gateway specialist that Symantec purchased in November 2007 for $350 million, didn't have a SaaS offering under development, but Hausman believes that under Symantec's wing, the unit can create new capabilities by tying some of the on-premise capabilities of its technology with in-the-cloud services for message filtering and archiving.Other opportunities for SaaS will emerge around anti-virus protection, security policy management, remote systems management and IT continuity protection, he said.
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On Wednesday, Symantec released a beta of its new enterprise security product, Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0, formerly codenamed Hamlet. The beta marks the company&#39;s most significant update to its enterprise security software in years.
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The Symantec Corporation, a leader in security software and one of Silicon Valley&#39;s oldest companies, announced early Thursday that it would acquire Veritas Software
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Blog: New behavior-monitoring protection for the desktop is designed to compliment features in existing Symantec products.
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Although Windows XP Service Pack 2 has been released to manufacturing, some of the world's leading antivirus vendors including Symantec and McAfee are still in the process of assuring compatibility. As these ISVs continue to perfect their code, a little known vendor called Eset has already beaten them to the punch.
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Computer-security software maker Symantec today plans to unveil a new strategy for offering large businesses more services along with software for managing their computer networks.
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(InfoWorld) - Delivering on a promise made earlier this year, SAP has unveiled the first set of products to help businesses meet their compliance requirements, in addition to announcing a marketing agreement with Cisco Systems. The three new governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) applications, based on SAP's new SOA (service-oriented architecture), offer companies help with repository, process control, and risk management functions, the Walldorf, Germany, company said Wednesday. In May, SAP announced theÂ creation of a new GRC business unitÂ at its Sapphire customer event in Orlando. The unit was set up to develop new technology to help companies meet a growing list of compliance requirements, such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations for pharmaceutical companies, and Basel II regulations for the banking sector. The SAP GRC Repository application documents and maintains GRC information in a single central system, including corporate policies and regulations, and will also store and link risk and control libraries to multiple control frameworks and international regulations. The centralization of GRC information simplifies risk management, increases transparency and cuts costs associated with GRC initiatives, according to SAP. SAP GRC Process Control is designed to automatically aggregate business process risks for the entire company, provide supporting evidence of compliance and pinpoint control violations so that corrective action can be given a priority. The software integrates automated control monitoring for SAP and non-SAP applications. To help customers implement collaborative risk management processes, the SAP GRC Risk Management application provides a thorough analysis of key business risks at multiple levels of the company, across organization entities, business process and IT infrastructure, according to SAP. It is designed to help professional risk managers and company owners identify financial, legal and operational risks, analyze business opportunities in light of these and develop appropriate responses. SAP will sell all three products separately. The repository and process control applications will ship Nov. 30, with the risk management software product to follow in December. In addition, SAP has signed a joint marketing agreement with Cisco that will target GRC business processes and IT control issues across the entire IT infrastructure, including the network and application layers. Under the agreement, targeted at the U.S. and Canada, the companies will collaborate in sales and marketing activities, and provide complementary products that offer new levels of IT management and controls between Cisco's service-oriented network architecture (SONA) and SAP's three new GRC applications. Further information about the products isÂ available here.
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(Source: Symantec) Symantec takes a comprehensive approach to managing multilevel applications, with integratedcomponents for coordinated management of every element affecting performance of multilevel applications.Application Performance Management (APM) from Symantec supports custom and packaged applications, middleware, databases, storage, and more-across all major OS, application, server, and storage platforms.
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Global security software maker Symantec is to take over Veritas Software in a merger deal valued at $13.5bn (Â£7bn). The all-share deal will see Symantec swap 1.1242 shares of common stock for each Veritas share.