Symantec: Singular focus in a diverse region

Symantec’s Senior Vice President in APJ, Sanjay Rohatgi observed that Asia’s unique mix of advanced and emerging countries is showing up different levels of thought processes as to why cyber security is critical. “We see a mixed bag of awareness.”

But even in emerging countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia and so on, awareness is increasing rapidly. “Security used to be about meeting compliance, but now efforts are more proactive and businesses are more conscious about advanced threat protection (ATP),” Sanjay shared.

Rationalisation

Last year, Symantec had spun off their information management division to become Veritas Technologies. Now it is a privately held company, owned by private equity firm, The Carlyle Group.

“Information management is as important as information security. When (both are) clumped together, they are not able to innovate faster.”

So Symantec and Veritas both decided it better to divest Veritas’ asset to an organisation that is better able to drive innovation, and stave off startups in the information management, backup and availability space, that Veritas is in.

“There is only so much R&D dollars we can spend,” Sanjay opined adding that Symantec customers all across the globe are now happy because they want Symantec to be security-focused only and were waiting for the split to happen.

“Procurement-wise, it is just one more vendor to deal with along with their many other vendors. Now, every Chief Information Officer and Chief Information and Security Officer is happy with our singular focus.”

More complexity

This singular focus is crucial.

According to Sanjay, security is becoming so complex in itself, it has required vendors like Symantec needing partners to help with the architecture of security as well, something that is so important given the many threat vectors that have emerged in recent years.

“We want to start talking to customers about what their 2020 security architecture should look like,” Sanjay emphasised.

He also pointed out how he sees endpoint security starting to gain importance again. “And Symantec is a leader there with over 200 million endpoints globally. The game is going back to endpoints.”

Realising that just endpoint security isn’t enough, and recognising need to address advanced persistent threats (APT), Symantec’s portfolio extends to also email and IDS (intrusion detection solutions) and IPS (intrusion prevention solutions) APIs that can integrate into their security partners’ appliances.

Cybersecurity services, is another area that is working out very well for Symantec with global growth of 20-percent year-on-year.

“We have four security operations centres (SOCs), in Asia Pacific and Japan region, serving a global audience from Singapore, Chennai, Sydney and Japan,” said Sanjay.

A vast network

Symantec boasts the world’s largest global intelligent network, with presence in over 150 countries, and ability to detect 7.6 trillion security events.

With all this huge amount of data being collected in real-time from so many different sources across the globe, a natural emphasis for Symantec is to leverage big data security analytics to add more value for their customers.

“We launch a lot of products based on this,” Sanjay said.

Moving forward

With so many different levels of security awareness, Symantec recognises that the onus is on them to create awareness in the industry.

His advice for every business out there today? “You have to understand what your security posture is going to be, and get a professional organisation to look at your solutions and do a proper audit. Look at the best practices of your industry and work with Symantec to ensure better protection.”