Symantec made a stop in sunny Singapore as part of its Symantec Vision world tour, their yearly user and technical conference that focuses on offerings that the company has made available to customers in the South Asia region.
Enrique Salem, Symantec’s president and CEO, delivered the keynote address, identifying significant trends in cloud computing, mobility and virtualisation that are driving IT transformation for businesses. He also took the opportunity to outline the ways Symantec is enabling customers and partners to benefit from these trends.
“IT trends in mobile, cloud computing and virtualisation is driving increased connectivity on an unprecedented scale. These connections are creating greater opportunities and greater points of risk – risk to our intellectual property, financial integrity, corporate reputation, the control of our individual and corporate identities, privacy and even national infrastructures,” says Enrique Salem, Symantec president and CEO, in his keynote address. “Without the promise of protection, the connected world will not reach its full potential. As an industry pioneer, Symantec is committed to enabling users to secure and manage their information assets and identities so they can embrace the latest trends and leverage the full benefits of the connected world with confidence.”
According to Symantec’s 2011 State of Cloud Survey across the Asia South region, eighty-four percent of respondents are confident that moving to the cloud will not impact, or will actually improve their security. However, achieving security for cloud environments is also a top concern for these organisations, which cited potential risks including malware, data breach from unauthorised use of cloud-based systems, sharing sensitive data insecurely, hacker-based theft, and loss of confidential data. The survey also revealed that IT organisations may not be adequately prepared for the move to the cloud, as more than half of the respondents stated that their IT staff is not ready at this time.
“Most organisations in Asia South generally believe that moving to the cloud will provide important business benefits and improve their security posture. But they are also concerned that cloud services bring their own risks such as malware attacks and data breach from unauthorised use of cloud-based systems,” says Anil Chakravarthy, senior vice president, Storage and Availability Management Group, Symantec. “To ensure success, IT departments need to carefully select the applications that move to the cloud; closely monitor the security, availability, and cost of cloud services; and ensure that their staff have received the proper training and preparation.”
Angela Tucci, Senior Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer for Symantec meanwhile says that while cloud computing is an innovation in the current IT industry, the security of information being shared in the cloud is important and that is where Symantec is a world leader in securing information online.” Cloud itself is a competitor to IT companies today that offer service, and because of that companies need to change their thinking to be more effective to their end users,” she added later on.
“In the future, if you want to maintain security, you need to focus on the constant in the enterprise – the user identity and information itself – as we can’t predict what platform it will be on next. Security will need to be more user- and information-centric now than ever before,” says Art Gilliland, Senior Vice President, Information Security Group “Our acquisition of Veritas opened our eyes to the importance of user security rather than just on the kernel level. We believe in the future that identity and information security is the only way to go than what we currently have had. It is not enough to just protect the infrastructure – the information in the infrastructure is as important as well. This is what Symantec is doing today.”
Over 1000 attendees from around the Asia South region attended the full-day conference, to network with both peers and Symantec executives for new ideas and information on cloud and Internet security.
