Symantec's Four New Security Suites: Targeting Risky Business

The suites, unveiled Tuesday at Symantec's Vision 2010 Conference, include Symantec Control and Compliance Suite, Data Loss Prevention Suite 10.5, Altiris IT Management Suite 7.0 and Symantec Protection Suite.

Specifically, Symantec Control and Compliance Suite is designed to better enable customers to develop and enforce IT policies with greater visibility into IT and compliance risks.

Altiris IT Management Suite 7.0 offers faster deployments and improved security, along with better manageability of information and infrastructure.

Data Loss Prevention Suite 10.5 prevents data loss through social media and addresses security concerns around private clouds.

Symantec Protection Suite provides protection for specific areas of IT infrastructure along with end-point, server and gateway security management.

David Dorosin, Symantec director of product marketing and enterprise security, said there would be opportunities for the channel to wrap services around the products but was vague about the extent of the opportunities, such as management and monitoring, that would be available to partners.

Dorosin said Symantec partners would be brought up to speed with product training as well as specializations -- such as Symantec's DLP certification -- that relate to specific technology areas.

The suites align with Symantec's stated goals of further integrating and consolidating, as well as addressing, emerging threats that target intellectual property and other corporate assets, underscored by the Google Operation Aurora attacks in January.

"Source code and design documents have certainly gotten a lot of attention," Dorosin said. "This is not a one-time thing. This is an ongoing trend that represents an ongoing risk for large enterprises."

The security suites are in line with consolidation trends that have been accelerated by the weak economy and the need for customers to cut costs and increase ROI. However, Dorosin said customers would probably not gravitate toward best-of-breed point products once the economy improves.

"Personally, I think the drive toward a more consolidated vendor base preceded the downturn. For many years now, the trend toward consolidation preceded economic problems," he said.