Symantec Vision 2012 Keynote – Tuesday November 13th – CCIB Forum Barcelona
Symantec Vision is this year for the third year in Barcelona. Next year Symantec Vision EMEA 2013 will be held in Nice, France. The first speaker of the keynote Tuesday 13 November, which is about Protection & Security, is Francis deSouza – Group President Enterprise Products and Services. He points out that there are radical changes in IT. Data is in the Cloud and there are more devices per uses than ever before. Symantec has done research and it shows that 50% of the ‘corporate data’ is outside of the firewall of an organization. All these changes make sure that an organization – and the IT department specifically – is less ‘in control’.
Francis deSouza also points out that the Threat Landscape changes. Symantec follows this realtime via her Global Intelligence Network (GIN). This network consists of hundreds of sensors divided over the world, who collect information about threats and Dataflow trends. A recent phenomenon is the Multi Flank Attack. These are multiple Deny-of-Service (DoS) attacks at the same time. An example is given about a bank that had a Multi Flank Attack Friday in the afternoon. This has been a targeted action in which hackers knew that less security professionals were present at the bank on Friday afternoon. During the DoS all the security professionals were busy with this and at that same time a Phising action was done after credit card numbers. This attack wasn’t spotted at that moment by the security professionals. This form of an attack is a new trend with cybercriminals.
Symantec is also talking about the growth in mobility during the keynote. According to Symantec there have been more iPads sold than PC’s during the last couple of months. Also, users start using more and more their own devices. The ‘Bring Your Own Device’ concept goes further according to Symantec: it isn’t just ‘Device’ but also ‘Applications’, ‘Data’, ‘Network’, ‘Datacenter’, etc. SO according to Symantec: Bring Your Own Everything. Because of this IT has less control, while security gets more important.
The last trend that deSouza presents is the trend of explosive datagrowth. Between 2011 and 2015 there will be a datagrowth to 8 Zettabyte. Maybe even more interesting is that from 20125 until 2020 this will grow with a factor of 40. At this moment two of the five largest building projects are oriented on building datacenters.
To manage the above trends, Symantec has launched three themes:
- Intelligent: an organization has to have ‘smart IT’. This also consists of insight into data. Who access has to which data, chargeback for storage and to bring information from the Symantec Intelligence Network (GIN) to local organizations;
- Efficient: to manage information in an efficient way. An example for this are the back-up appliances of Symantec. Easy to implement, maintain and also provided with next generation deduplication possibilities. Because of this duplication takes place everywhere whereby for example less bandwidth gets used for making a back-up.
- Agile: Symantec has the vision that every organizations has to be able to build a private cloud with the infrastructure they have now. This means that an organization has to be able to support Cloud and mobile devices and to have the choice to supply or don’t supply users of a corporate controlled mobile device. A product such as Symantec O3 makes it possible to unlock Cloud applications safely. With O3 it is possible to grant users access or to forbid users access to public cloud services, to integrate security such as Data Loss Prevention or to apply encryption.
As usual John Brigden of Symantec – senior Vice President EMEA sales – comes on stage after this. John points out that everything keeps on going faster. Some years ago Symantec spoke about Gb and Pb and now they are Zettabytes (Zb). Symantec expects a growth to ‘1 trillion mobile devices, 7.9 Zb’ the coming years and ‘93% of all mobile devices will be hacked’. It’s about governance. In both cloud, datacenter as mobility. The information is leading. John also speaks of an Information Centric model. This information gets used by users – User Centric. The focus of Symantec also is: Information centric security, Mobility without vulnerability, Availability anytime, anywhere and Information governance is a hyper-connected, mobile world.
After John Brigden the keynote gets contently closed by Greg Day – EMEA Security CTO & Directory of Security. He points out that nowadays everyone is a target for cybercriminals. So not only critical infrastructures such as a bank, oil company or airport. A lot of small suppliers are actually the target. Day presents the four foundations of Symantec Cyber Threat Intelligence:
- Cyber Awareness: training, briefing centers, strategic advisories, readiness assessments;
- Cyber Forensics: security base lining, incident & event management, threat analysis & response, threat impact assessment;
- Cyber Preparedness: business risk modelling, security baselining;
- Cyber Response: cyber incident advice.
As resume Day points out that right now worldwide there are 50 targeted attacks every day. A couple of years ago these were only a couple attacks every day. The landscape of a cybercriminal has changed and a hacker does not only think technically. An organization has to anticipate on this. The keynote of Symantec is closed with a demo about Mobile Device Management. Here Symantec shows live how to get control over the use of applications and data on an iPad without limiting the user too much. Even two-way authentication is possible as well as encryption.