Mauro Toson, Country Presales Manager, Symantec Italy.
How is the Italian Security market presenting itself and what are the prospects?
Companies that make IT their core business or those that use IT to support their main business activities pay good attention to security-related issues. Addressing these topics superficially could lead to very costly penalties. Data and IT infrastructure security guarantees business continuity for the company. This principle applies to all businesses, not only those operating in sectors particularly sensitive to information protection – such as finance or healthcare – and large companies, traditionally more accustomed to dealing with corporate security.
Regarding the prospects, an important role is played by compliance with local and international regulations that many companies must meet: compliance is one of the hot topics that will drive the security market in Italy.
What is companies’ relationship with this market?
Recent international events, the rapid evolution of threats, and the succession of cyberattacks against public institutions and companies, emphasized by the media, have significantly increased attention towards IT security.
Aside from the obvious point that every company should care about protecting its assets because its competitive ability depends on them, more and more companies feel the need to equip themselves with control processes and structures to implement or enhance IT security in an organic and structured way, and while in the past security could occupy a lower position in the priority scale of IT Managers, today it certainly holds a position of utmost importance.
What is Symantec’s vision?
Managing corporate security is a very complex process, often carried out by resorting to a disorganized mix of multivendor commercial solutions lacking integration and interoperability.
The main challenge companies face concerns managing complex security infrastructures and the amount of data generated by all installed security devices.
Symantec’s vision is to provide, through solutions, services, and sharing our proven expertise in the sector, the appropriate level of protection to the so-called “digital world” while simplifying its management. When the term “protection” is used in the IT world, the focus is often on partial areas, such as infrastructure, applications, or data: Symantec also protects the interactions between these three components: infrastructure, applications, and data itself. Symantec’s approach is also based on the availability of flexible policies and advanced event management capabilities that allow companies to proactively protect their networks from known threats and to respond in real time to new types of attacks.
Who is your typical customer?
Symantec’s product portfolio is truly broad: it can satisfy the entire range of customers starting from Enterprise clients, passing through SMBs, all the way to the needs of SOHO users or individual consumers. Given that security means protecting and ensuring data availability, Symantec offers solutions for high system reliability with a focus on safeguarding information. The solutions are OPEN (multi-platform, both hardware and software/operating systems) and scalable: everyone from single consumer users to large companies can benefit from Symantec’s solutions.
Who are your competitors?
A portfolio of solutions so broad, multi-platform, and scalable means facing many competitors in the market, but if we consider the entire offering globally, finding a competitor becomes realistically difficult: a complete coverage of our portfolio is not easily matched by the main players active in the software world today. One should also consider some Hardware Vendors who target their Software offerings to support their Hardware portfolio, and even in this category of vendors, finding a portfolio similar to Symantec’s is very difficult.
If we analyze product by product, the number of competitors is really huge, also because many small companies offer niche solutions: but what about what customers want along with the solution: integration into infrastructure, reduced complexity, high levels of support, expertise, and a complete vision of the picture, not just a corner of the sheet.
What does Symantec offer more compared to competitors present in Italy, why choose you?
Symantec is the fourth largest software producer in the world: this ranking also reflects the company’s size, solidity, and ability to invest in research and development. We can support our customers with a truly broad portfolio of products and solutions. We provide our customers with a “Global Intelligence Network” consisting of 4 SOCs, 8 Security Response Centers, more than 40,000 sensors in about 180 countries continuously monitoring the internet for new threats. We can provide consulting services on security topics involving the definition of procedures and policies; we can assist clients in discovering their vulnerabilities and complying with current regulations. We offer consulting on security that operates completely independently of software solutions: we give guidance, study policies and strategies that the client will implement with the solutions they consider most appropriate. We can help build a complete security picture: we possess all the pieces necessary to complete the puzzle.
What are the latest developments in the sector?
Among the most recent announcements is Symantec Information Foundation 2007, the new integrated suite for security and archiving. This solution provides a common framework to uniformly apply content control policies across the enterprise environment, from security on the email gateway to archiving. With Symantec Information Foundation, IT professionals can counter risks such as data loss and policy violations, responding quickly and cost-effectively to electronic data discovery requests (e-discovery). All systems used by companies to exchange and store information are vulnerable and exposed to threats that jeopardize security, compliance, and regulatory adherence. Symantec Information Foundation protects against these risks, safeguarding all corporate IT systems such as email, instant messaging, web communications, and file sharing.
The suite’s specific features include content control with automatic classification and policy application for effective risk management, integrated incident management and handling to ensure risk management compliance, and centralized archiving, auditing, and discovery functions.
How was the past year and what are your future goals?
Despite the general difficult moment that most companies are facing, the fiscal year that is about to close sees Symantec in line with the assigned targets.
One of the goals is to share with our customers the approach and implementation of “Security 2.0,” our vision regarding protecting clients from the new generation of threats affecting data and interactions. Security 2.0 brings together an ecosystem of products, services, and partnerships to help clients operate confidently and securely in the connected world.
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