Symantec on the Cutting Edge of technology

Symantec has been hosting its Cutting Edge conference for many years, but it

has mostly been a private affair where some of the brightest Symantec engineers

gather to exchange ideas on new technologies. This year however, Symantec opened

up the conference for select media from around the world to give them a taste of

some of the hottest technologies and innovations that the world can expect from

the company.

Symantec is planning to introduce a host of innovative products and solutions

based on four key technologies and trends-White listing, Virtualization, Data

Loss Prevention, and open collaborative architecture. Out of these,

virtualization doesn't need any introduction.White listing has also been fairly

well-known, but mostly in the world of anti-spam. Now however, you can expect

this technology to be used in anti-virus software as well. Data loss prevention

or DLP is aimed at helping organizations protect their data from getting stolen,

lost, etc. Considering the volume of digital data present in organizations

today, a solution like DLP becomes the need of the hour. So, security is not

only about protecting your infrastructure, but it's also about protecting your

information.

Symantec's virtualization plans



You can now expect some pretty interesting solutions from Symantec based on
virtualization. Commenting on Symantec's way forward with virtualization, Bruce

McCorkendale, Distinguished Engineer, from Symantec's CTO Strategy Office said

“We help you use virtualization to separate out all information that matters and

then help you protect it, manage it completely, automatically control and secure

it.” He described how they arrived at the overarching framework behind

Symantec's virtualization strategy. There are so many different things you can

do with virtualization, i.e. server virtualization, app virtualization, storage,

desktop, to presentation virtualization. Though all of them are different, the

common thread is that people use them to gain flexibility. So you'll factor one

thing from the others, i.e. factor the OS from physical hardware in platform

virtualization, factor the applications and their settings from the OS in

application virtualization, etc. “This reduces everything to data”, he said.

After that you have Symantec's solutions that help you protect, secure, and

automatically manage it. One of their solutions, NetBackup for instance,

integrates with VMware Backup Consolidated Infrastructure or VCB for short. The

solution puts minimal stress on the VMware ESX Server. “You want to backup a

machine for instance, you tell ESX Server, and it takes a snapshot, and puts it

out on a Shared SAN drive. Now all the backup processing happens on a different

machine, so you're not impacting ESX workload”, said Bruce. Likewise, the

solution indexes all content after taking a full backup. So you can for

instance, restore a full Exchange Server database, or pluck out individual

emails to restore.

The Tonight Show in the morning: Mark Bregman, CTO,Symantec hosts the show and interviews key execs from Symantec on how they're innovating.

Most computer users in organizations today are constrained with what they can

use on their desktops and laptops by the IT department. While users want more

freedom over their desktops, the IT department wants more control over them to

keep them secure. So in a way, both sides are justified with their stands,

leading to a deadlock situation. Ultimately of course, the users have to

grudgingly give in to the IT department's demands. Semantec has a solution that

would allow users to do whatever they want on their desktops, but at the same

time, would allow the IT department to provide enterprise applications to users

through virtualization. These applications would remain completely safe from any

kind of security threats.

White listing: the way ahead?



Anti-virus software will see a complete make-over, thanks to White listing. The
technology has been present in anti-spam software for many years. In anti-spam,

it allows only approved senders to send or receive mails, while those on the

black list are blocked. Similarly, Symantec plans to use the same White listing

technology for anti-virus software, and not without good reason. So is white

listing really the way forward for anti-virus software? “It is part of the way”,

said Mark Bregman, CTO of Symantec. “The challenge is that, in the last 12

months, we've created more black signatures than in the whole history of our

company before. That's ridiculous, and it's getting worse. At a certain point,

there's so much malware that you almost can't keep up. So you change your

strategy, instead of finding malware, let's list the goodware, which is white

listing.”

Technologies for safe surfing



Consumers are the most vulnerable to security threats, and not without good
reason. They are not so tech-savvy, and so don't have sufficient know how to

combat security threats. So while we continue to educate consumers about

emerging security threats, they need simple solutions to keep them safe from

security threats on the web. Symantec is working on technologies for safe web

surfing. The first place that most consumers start their Internet experience is

a popular search engine like Google, Yahoo!, or MSN Live. Usually the search

engine pops up thousands of web sites for a single search result. The poor

consumer has no way of knowing whether these sites are safe to go to or not.

With the safe surf solution, every search result will be tagged with a check or

cross to denote whether the site is safe to visit or not. Moreover, the user can

also find out more about an unsafe website and security threats it is hosting

like Trojans, malware, etc. Not only that, but consumers even can contribute to

the site through a separate social networking facility and read comments from

other users about specific sites. The product is still in beta, but is initially

expected to be made available as a plug-in to Symantec's Norton Internet

Security Suite 2009.

Data Loss Prevention and Open Collaborative Architecture



DLP is a part of Symantec's information risk management strategy. All
information about this solution was under NDA during the visit to Cutting Edge.

However, later, Symantec announced the release of Data Loss Prevention v9.0. The

solution covers endpoint, network and storage solutions, providing a unified

interface to protect both structured and unstructured data.

The Open Collaborative Architecture is a technology direction to ensure

greater interoperability between various Symantec solutions as well as

third-party solutions. According to Symantec, the solution would be an open,

standard based set of guidelines and technologies. It will allow

interoperability between various applications and management through Symantec's

management platform.

Anil Chopra was hosted in Salt Lake City by Symantec