SYDNEY, Australia – 18 September, 2012 – Today at the Symantec Symposium 2012 (NASDAQ:SYMC) in Sydney, Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan APM, National Manager High Tech Crime Operations, Australian Federal Police discussed how the biggest online security threats are impacting the way consumers, enterprises and governments protect their information and identities.
Symantec executives Bernard Kwok, senior vice president, Asia Pacific and Japan, and Brenton Smith, vice president and managing director, Pacific region also shared the company’s vision across today’s biggest trends such as mobility, virtualisation, cloud, and big data.
“The Internet is now an intrinsic component of our modern global society providing a platform for instant business and social communication,” said Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan APM, National Manager, High Tech Crime Operations, Australian Federal Police. “Countless activities aided by the Internet bring plenty of positive benefits to our lives, however its growth and global reach have also provided opportunities for criminals to conduct illicit activity more efficiently, economically, and to an extent anonymously. The ability to use technology to commit crime, attack critical infrastructures, and undermine national security is a very real threat that law enforcement is responding to and, every organisation, large or small, needs to ensure they have a defense-in-depth strategy for protecting the vital assets on which their business depends.”
With the proliferation of mobile devices across Australia, it’s also expected that new threats on mobile devices will be introduced and exploited by cybercriminals, causing many consumers and enterprises to be cautious about placing personal or confidential information on their mobile devices. According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, the number of mobile threats increased by 93 percent in 2011 and in the past year, Symantec blocked 5.5 billion attacks.
“We live in an always on, connected world,” said Bernard Kwok, senior vice president, Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec. “Mobile devices are truly becoming first class citizens of corporate IT. They are being used for work more than ever before and corporate applications are not the only apps being accessed, as more and more employees use consumer mobile applications for business.”
Symantec’s most recent State of Mobility survey found that 70 percent of businesses said data loss and malware infection were two of their top risks for mobile computing. In addition, Symantec estimates that 60 percent of companies are already making line-of-business applications accessible from mobile devices.
“We believe you shouldn’t have to sacrifice protection for productivity,” Kwok continued. “Allowing employees to bring their own devices into the workplace and use them to access corporate networks and information does not mean you have to compromise on protection. Symantec protects you and your business’ information regardless of platform and we offer the best capabilities in mobile device and mobile application management to protect information on company and employee owned devices.”
As with mobile devices, companies want to be able to take advantage of the productivity that comes with the cloud but are concerned about protection. To take advantage of the opportunities, businesses must be able to protect information across corporate and employee-owned devices as well as public and private infrastructure that may be a physical or virtual environment.
Today, most organisations have already virtualised some of their application workloads and plan to virtualise more. Virtualising business-critical applications delivers significant strategic benefits and is a key step toward a cloud model of IT service delivery.
But these applications also require provably high levels of security, resiliency, performance, and operational efficiency. Symantec solutions for business-critical virtualisation are optimised for all leading virtualisation platforms, and provide the advanced security, availability, and storage management capabilities required to virtualise business-critical applications with confidence.
“Yesterday’s solutions won’t completely protect your company today,” said Brenton Smith, vice president and managing director, Pacific region, Symantec. “Confidence ultimately means businesses having visibility and control of their information wherever it resides. At Symantec, we’re focused on protecting people and information – whether it’s in the data centre on physical or virtual servers, structured in databases or in archives for long term storage and retention.”
Taking place in across eight cities in Australia and New Zealand, the Symantec Symposium series is sponsored by Dell, Intel, Red Hat, VMware, Data#3 and Insight. More information about the 2012 Symantec Symposium can be found here.
About Symantec
Symantec protects the world’s information, and is the global leader in security, backup and availability solutions. Our innovative products and services protect people and information in any environment – from the smallest mobile device, to the enterprise data centre, to cloud-based systems. Our industry-leading expertise in protecting data, identities and interactions gives our customers confidence in a connected world. More information is available at www.symantec.com or by connecting with Symantec at: go.symantec.com/socialmedia.