Symantec and Partners: Helping Businesses Achieve Safe Clouds

[John_Eldh]

Our channel partners have always been on the front lines when it comes to solving problems for businesses, by bringing the right solutions into the workplace. In the next few years, for example, we anticipate a fundamental shift in the use and the safety of the cloud – a future where the cloud is safer than the data center. In this future of secure clouds, employees will leverage multiple complex clouds for storing all kinds of business and personal information and have the ability to seamlessly access this information without worrying about how it’s protected. Behind the scenes, IT will be full of specialized employees, each performing one essential function with the help of the latest solutions ensuring organizations continue to maintain their security posture.

We have some work to do before we get to that point, of course. Right now businesses are dealing with rapidly growing, unstructured information that has no clear ownership and is constantly in danger of being stolen or lost as it moves beyond the corporate firewall. We need to not only make clouds safe, but they have to be user-friendly and offer high availability. That’s why Symantec is developing improved solutions such as encryption, data loss prevention, backup and archiving tools that will protect and secure data wherever it is being stored and accessed. And this represents an incredible opportunity for our partners as businesses begin to think of the cloud as more than a novelty.

To bring these solutions to the customer, we are also working to make the partner environment as productive as possible - regardless of their business model or level of cloud expertise. We’ve been introducing new programs and placing more focus on helping our partners get into new markets, to drive exponential growth. We are making additional resources available so that our partners can more effectively deliver solutions into the hands of more businesses. Examples include:

•  CloudSmart e-learning course, which is an indispensable tool for partners looking to break into the cloud space; more than 300 partners recently completed the course and are leveraging the new revenue streams this program facilitates.
• Symantec’s enhanced subscription-based licensing program (ExSP ) makes it easier to purchase Symantec solutions via a subscription-based model, thus reducing the licensing fees as the partner’s business volume increases.
• Symantec Cloud Security Essentials Training shares critical cloud knowledge and best practices on building and protecting clouds to help customers design and architect a comprehensive cloud data security strategy, based on Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) guidelines.

Partners will also be able to manage their deployments more easily, building customer confidence in Symantec and our partners alike. Whether you sell, manage, host or build cloud solutions for your customers, Symantec offers you the strength of brand, choice of technologies, and host of resources you need to differentiate your services, maximize customer benefits, and accelerate potential profits – today and into the future.

There’s never been a better time for partners to get into the cloud market. We’re rapidly evolving into a new world of seamless interconnectivity, and at Symantec we recognize the key role our partner community will play in this transition. Working together, we can help businesses implement a safe and secure cloud strategy, improving their productivity and ensuring continued success for partners, their customers and Symantec as a whole.

We’d like to hear from you about how to make safe clouds a reliable reality. What are you doing to help your customers benefit from the cloud?