Threats to information continually evolve, and new security solutions from Symantec help organizations of all sizes identify and combat coordinated, multi-pronged attacks on information which are striking businesses with increasing frequency. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12, now available for public beta and optimized for virtual environments, will offer organizations the vital protection needed to effectively block both known and new cyber threats. Symantec Protection Center 2.0 will draw upon correlated visibility from multiple security products combined with Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network to provide relevant actionable intelligence that reduces risks to enterprise businesses.
The sheer volume of sophisticated attacks targeting organizations of all sizes poses a daunting challenge for traditional signature-based security solutions that can’t keep up. According to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, in 2010, attackers unleashed more than 286 million distinct malicious programs, an average of more than nine new threats every second of every day. These threats impact multiple areas of the IT infrastructure with a 93 percent increase in Web-based attacks, 42 percent more mobile vulnerabilities, and 6,253 new vulnerabilities including 14 zero-day vulnerabilities which played a key role in targeted attacks like Hydraq and Stuxnet. Security solutions that provide central management and security intelligence are required to combat persistent, coordinated assaults on organizations today.
To provide protection against this new threat landscape, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 is designed to detect and block sophisticated new threats earlier, more accurately, and with greater performance than any other security product. Symantec Endpoint Protection leverages Insight, Symantec’s community and cloud-based reputation technology, to block new and unknown threats missed by other security solutions. By blocking risky files with a poor reputation from entering an organization, Symantec Endpoint Protection provides a vital first line of defense in the battle against advanced persistent threats. Built for speed and effectiveness in virtual environments, internally-conducted testing of the software in heavily consolidated virtual environments shows a 90 percent reduction in disk usage, thus delivering up to a tenfold increase in consolidation density. Symantec continues to work closely with VMware to take full advantage of virtualization awareness and introspection capabilities based on VMware vShield technology, and Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 is the first step along the optimization path for virtual and cloud environments.
Large and small organizations differ vastly in the complexity of environments and the expertise required to deploy and manage protection which is why Symantec provides different offerings based on those organizational needs. For mid- to large-sized organizations, Symantec offers Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 for on-premises deployment. For smaller organizations, Symantec offers both on-premises and cloud-based solutions with Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition and Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud, respectively, providing customers with flexibility of choice and freedom of deployment to best meet their business needs.
Effective protection against today’s complex attacks requires correlated visibility into multiple security products along with actionable intelligence to reduce risk and simplify management. Without a way to summarize and prioritize risk factors across products, groups and regions, organizations can easily overlook high-severity threats and compromise their security posture. Symantec Protection Center 2.0 is a centralized security management console that will allow organizations to identify emerging threats, prioritize tasks and accelerate time to protection based on relevant, actionable intelligence.
To identify emerging threats across local and global environments, Symantec Protection Center will offer a centralized view across the Symantec security portfolio and third-party products through three levels of integration – single sign-on, data collection and process automation. Organizations will be able to extract local intelligence from their security solutions to identify trends across areas such as malware, spam and assets. Symantec Protection Center delivers context-aware security management by correlating data from enterprise security products along with early warning alerts from the Symantec’s Global Intelligence Network, one of the world’s leading commercial cyber-intelligence communities. Symantec Protection Center 2.0 is fully integrated with Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and will be available for existing Symantec customers of integrated products at no additional charge later this year.
Symantec Security Framework
Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Protection Center are part of the Symantec Security Framework, a portfolio of security products and services that enable organizations to counter emerging threats, support new computing models and simplify security management. Symantec’s portfolio of security products and services allow organizations to pursue innovations – such as mobile, cloud and virtual computing models. By providing relevant, actionable security intelligence and simultaneously simplifying security management, businesses can increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of their security posture.
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