As Symantec continue to be the leaders in security, their Symantec Vision 2011 conference was held at the Sydney Convention Exhibition Centre on the 13th of September. This conference allowed Symantec, its sponsors and the business community to discuss the changing threat landscape with solutions and strategies for both small and large businesses.

In an almost Steve Jobs type atmosphere, the conference was introduced by three keynote speakers that included Craig Scroggie (Vice President & Managing Director, Pacific Region Symantec), Angela Tucci (Senior Vice President & Chief Strategy Officer Symantec Corporation) and Nick Leeson (otherwise known as the Rogue Trader).

The two keynote speakers from Symantec discussed the future of security within the industry from Symantec Enterprise Solutions to the phenomenon known as the data explosion and mobile devices. The key theme was that businesses need to address new technologies within their business infrastructures in order “surround yourself” with appropriate protection strategies.

According to Angela Tucci “IT trends in mobile, cloud and virtualisation are driving increased connectivity on an unperceived scale. These connections are creating greater opportunities and greater points or risk; risk to our intellectual property, financial integrity, corporate reputation, the control of our individual and corporate identities, privacy and even national infrastructures”.

This was mirrored by the interesting guest speaker, Nick Leeson whose fraudulent and unauthorised speculative trading caused the collapse of the United Kingdom’s oldest investment bank, Barings. Leeson highlighted that his company did not have any real checks or security in place which allowed him to invest millions of dollars in speculative trading.

Tucci also provided some interesting insights into the cloud and linked it back to the origin of Hotmail in 1996 and since then, the data explosion has encompassed elements from social data, enterprise data, e-mail and files which can be a challenge when data mining. Finally, Tucci summed up the importance of protecting businesses, stating that “people pay to protect what they care about” and data in the business world should be our most utmost importance to keeping it safe.