Symantec Launches Consolidated Security Suites

Amid targeted staff cuts and a push to help VARs bolster their consulting practices, Symantec also is making some product moves. The effort includes four new software suites that attempt to simplify Symantec’s product line. Here’s a look at the strategy.

Bernard Laroche, senior director of product marketing for Enterprise and SMBs at Symantec, described the suite strategy to me.

“[With these] 4 new suites, [we’re changing] our go-to-market strategy.” he noted. And what’s changing exactly? Laroche elaborated.

In response, Laroche says: “We now offer complete suites [with] no compromise in security level.”

So what once was an a-la-cart choosing of components of security now has been broken down into 4 specific security suites. They include:

Symantec is  obsessed lately with not just ‘external security’ but ‘internal’ security as well. They’ve focused on the latest “Hydraq” attack — a trojan — but they’ve also focused on social engineering scams that compromise security as well.

And regarding that ‘internal’ network, Laroche stressed that “Data-spillage [on users’ desktops] provides an opportunity for the bad guy to find the information somewhere else.” He noted often times hackers and trojans get the information they need without even hitting a main super-secure sever, since users request info from the secure server to unsecured desktop computers. And Laroche said hackers are patient. They’ll wait ’till sensitive data is finally unsecured.

Symantec’s 2010 “State of Enterprise Security Report” claimed that 100 percent of respondents experienced a form of “cyber loss” in 2009. That’s something Symantec plans to mitigate with the aforementioned collection of suites.

Partner Focus

What’s the news for partners here? Laroche stressed that Symantec was “unique” because of the size of their portfolio but then really hammered the following point home…

Still, Symantec faces plenty of competition from a lengthy list of software companies. Plus, we’ll be curious to see if each of the Symantec security suites is truly integrated with a small memory footprint.

And, we’ll be watching to see if Symantec can overcome a so-called security consumption gap: During a briefing last week, Sophos executives mentioned to us that many businesses continue to depend purely on anti-virus software and have yet to “consume” full-blown endpoint security suites. We’ll share more on that consumption gap later this week.

Additional insights from Joe Panettieri. Sign up for The VAR Guy’s Newsletter; Webcasts and Resource Center; and via RSS; Facebook; Identi.ca; Twitter and VARtweet.