At its user event in San Francisco last week, Symantec outlined its plans to protect enterprise data via a combination of client software and service provider network tools. However, some customers complained that the Symantec-Veritas combination has led to worse support and licensing problems for existing products.
Speaking at the Vision event, Symantec chief executive John Thompson stressed that security should not be limited to the LAN perimeter, but must be placed closer to firms’ data to protect it across their enterprise infrastructure.
Such a trusted environment could be made up of many different platforms and devices, spanning business partner networks, supply chains, and even customer links, with authorisation measures to ensure that the right people get access to the right information, according to Symantec.
But Thompson did not elaborate on any plans to integrate the necessary data encryption or identity management into enterprise Symantec products, though the firm did reveal plans for a consumer utility built around a shared database of trusted web sites.
“The network tier will always be a valuable way of evaluating the risk of malicious traffic, but it’s like saying that because I have door locks, I’m protected from all types of physical threats and that’s simply not true,” Thompson added.
Symantec will work with service providers to identify viruses, spam, denial-of-service and phishing attacks in network traffic and stop them before they reach end-user devices. Similar capabilities are already embedded in routers from network vendors such as Cisco, Juniper and others.
Symantec is also preparing for more competition from Microsoft. Although its Norton security tools are widely deployed on new PCs, Microsoft will integrate similar tools into future versions of Windows, including Vista. “The Microsoft brand is synonymous with a lot of things but not security,” Thompson said. “It’s not a foregone conclusion that it will win.”
However, Symantec staff expressed doubts that the firm has the stomach for the looming battle, and pointed out that many customers who find Norton security products installed on their new computers disable or uninstall them to boost application and system performance. “What’s in John Thompson’s head is not necessarily what the strategy is going to be,” said one insider.
Thompson said progress following the Symantec-Veritas union was good. But customers complained that support for some Symantec products had deteriorated, with technical staff over-stretched by supporting too many applications.
One US customer said there had been a “serious degradation” in support for certain apps since the merger, and Thompson conceded this had been a problem. “We’ve struggled to ramp up support for Enterprise Vault this year,” Thompson said. “It is not a funding issue. The team had an open ticket to buy in people to fill the void but we couldn’t find the skills in the market.”
Another customer, based in India, complained about the ongoing absence of support for continuous data protection and third-party encryption tools in the Windows-based NetBackup application. Others described ongoing issues with product licensing, and called for less complex, unified purchasing strategies for both vendors’ products.
‹ Guarding desktops, p17 ‹ Threat control, p36
