The Partner’s Role in Securing the Virtual Environment

[Pamela_Reese]

By Feris Rifai, Founder and CEO of Bay Dynamics

As a Symantec technology partner, one of the trends that continues to persist among our customers is the growing adoption of virtualization technology. Virtual servers and desktops are becoming more than just a novelty; they are changing the way businesses function. With a vast amount of benefits – including cost-savings and greater efficiency -- more and more businesses are increasing their investment in virtualization deployments. The bottom line is -- it is critical for our business that we offer products and services that help our customers maintain their security posture while continuing to evolve and adopt new technologies in order to meet growing customer demand.

Virtualization presents a particular challenge as businesses are looking to secure both physical and virtual environments simultaneously; previously, this would require organizations to implement and manage a slew of point products to address their security needs. Fortunately, this approach has evolved – with Symantec at the forefront of this evolution -- offering one comprehensive, powerful security solution that can work across multiple platforms. That’s where, as a partner, Symantec Endpoint Protection is particularly valuable, allowing us to offer our customers real value with its unique capabilities combined with the brand confidence that Symantec instills.

The latest update to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 provides support for major operating systems, including the new Windows 8 and Mac OS X Mountain Lion, and offers seamless integration with VMware vShield Endpoint. This moves antimalware processing from the machine to a secure virtual appliance, placing less of a demand on the virtual machine itself. Symantec Endpoint Protection has also added shared Insight cache functionality, which is extremely helpful in reducing resource usage. In scanning virtual machines, this feature eliminates the need to scan duplicate files on other machines, greatly improving efficiency. And Symantec’s enhanced SONAR behavior reputation engine now monitors 1,390 behaviors -- more than three times the previous version– improving its ability to defend against malicious attacks such as zero-day exploits. This is critical as the last line of defense.

Our customers with virtualized environments have experienced significant benefits with the deployment of Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 – both in the increased level of security and in improved server performance. Businesses depend on us to help them make the right technology decisions that will help them compete in today’s global economy -- by leveraging Symantec’s best-in-breed security products, they are able to achieve this success. The latest update demonstrates Symantec’s ongoing commitment to proactively anticipate and address customer needs; by consistently adding new capabilities to their breadth of products in order to ensure physical and virtual resources are secure, Symantec has continued to validate their leadership in the endpoint security market.