After its recent tie-up with Veritas earlier in June, 2005, Symantec organized its first big international event-Vision 2005 at Mumbai on October 25, 2005. Veritas used to organize this event every year before the merger as well. Last year, the event was attended by approximately 700 people, but this time around, nearly 2,000 participants were present.

Other than presenting the visionary awards to Symantec customers in various fields, the event released the IDC survey on security threats faced by the mid-sized enterprise sector. Besides this, the company also introduced its two new products-Backup Exec 10d for Windows Server and new additions to its LifeStave family of Windows server and desktop infrastructure management solutions.

TAKING CHARGE: Vishal Dhupar, the newly appointed MD of Symantec, is geared up to take the twin offerings of Veritas and Symantec to the channel community

Five Symantec customers were awarded the Visionary awards for their excellent performance in various categories. The award winners were HDFC bank for Data Protection, Punjab National Bank for Information Security, Tata Consultancy Services for High Availability, ICICI Bank for Server and Storage Utilization and Bharti Tele-Ventures for Data Replication. All these companies have met the various challenges associated with the corporate segment today.

Speaking at the awards ceremony, Steven Leonard, Senior VP, Symantec, Asia Pacific and Japan said, "Symantec's business is to help customers leverage technology to address critical issues and these progressive organizations have done a commendable task for their innovative use of technology."

Virus threats: A major concern
Various studies conducted for the mid-sized companies by IDC revealed that recently virus threats have grown to a large extent and 20% of such companies have expressed a major concern for the security and data protection. 63% of the companies, with an average number of 267 employees and the turnovers ranging between 26 crore to 100 crore, face security threat through virus coming from Internet and emails.

It is surprising that in spite of the increasing threats in security issues, there are still a large number of mid-sized companies, who are not using any type of security solutions yet for various reasons. The most common reason, which is dissuading these companies from deploying security solutions, is the high installation costs.

TAKING CHARGE: Vishal Dhupar, the newly appointed MD of Symantec, is geared up to take the twin offerings of Veritas and Symantec to the channel community

Speaking about the appalling costs, Parijat Chakraborty, Senior Manager, User and Communication Research, IDC (India) said, "It is true that there are issues of costs while implementing a security solution. But the mid-sized corporate needs to understand that if there is any virus attack, then the hassles in terms of costs and management can be far more."

Parijat also mentioned that mid-sized companies in Delhi have comparatively better awareness about the security issues with 93% of the companies having a definite security policy. Mumbai and Chennai follow this, where 63% and 62% of the companies have security policy respectively. The IDC report also revealed that in the mid-sized corporate sector, Symantec almost captured 68% of the entire market and lagging far behind in the second position is McAfee, with 11% presence.

Why security threats are on a rise?
The main reasons for an increase in security threats, according to Dean Turner, Executive Editor, Symantec Internet Security Threat Report include the attackers being motivated by financial gain, failings in the traditional perimeter defenses like firewall and the increase in the volume and severity of the attacks. Referring to the half yearly tenure from January to June, he said, "Presently security attacks are being increasingly targeted. The attackers are mainly aiming through the web applications and browsers."

Dean said that in the present study, Symantec has noticed that the affected machines have increased by 143% and overall Symantec now attends to 10,352 such machines every day. Compared to the other countries, the United Kingdom is the worst affected with an average number of bot affected machines rising to 927 per day.

Among the web browsers, Mozilla browsers are more vulnerable to the security threats, where nearly 72% machines are attacked. Internet Explorer follows it closely, where 62% of machines are attacked. Dean informed, "Among the Internet security attacks, we have observed that most of the machines were affected through mass mailing worms. The most popular worm in this category is Netsky P," he stated. He also revealed a startling fact that recently Symantec has discovered 10,866 new worms, which means that the release of the new worms are now up by 48% in compared to the last survey period.

Reliance on Internet on rise
Another starting fact was revealed by Mark Read, Technology Specialist- Microsoft Platform, Asia Pacific/ Japan, Symantec. He said, "The hard reality is that today 60% of the emails we receive are spams and the main concern for any corporate is that 75% of the company's intellectual property is contained in emails. It is also a fact that now with the expansion of geographical boundaries, 79% of the companies accept email as a written approval."

When Ajei Gopal, Senior VP, APJ, Symantec Corporation was asked that in such a vulnerable situation, what will be the steps of Symantec to motivate more and more companies to use the security solutions, he said, "We have regular campaigns, where we educate our partners and other companies about the necessity of using a security solution. We would continue with these types of similar programs in future also."

While the security threats do not show any sign of diminishing, what is heartening to notice is that vendors like Symantec are making a concentrated effort to educate their partners and customers on how best to safeguard themselves. This will work out as a mutually beneficial arrangement for all concerned-Symantec, its partners and their customers.

SHILPI DAS in Mumbai

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