Symantec's Flagship Storage, Security Apps Now On Amazon EC2

Symantec this week made its Veritas Storage Foundation Basic and its Endpoint Protection applications available on a subscription basis to customers who use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), said John Magee, vice president of marketing for the vendor.

Veritas Storage Foundation Basic provides centralized multihost storage management, online configuration and administration, and data migration tools.

Endpoint Security combines Symantec AntiVirus with threat prevention to defend against malware for endpoint devices on a network or compute cloud.

Both applications offer all the tools of the stand-alone versions.

It was important for Symantec and its customers to make its storage and security applications available to Amazon EC2 customers as quickly as possible, Magee said.

"Whenever anyone talks about the cloud, they talk about the need for security and protecting data," he said.

The applications are available to Amazon EC2 customers who use that cloud computing infrastructure for things like handling spikes in Web service demand or building temporary test and development environments, Magee said.

To use them, customers who have an Amazon EC2 account can use that account or go through Symantec to sign up for a subscription to the Veritas Storage Foundation Basic or Endpoint Protection applications. They can then deploy the Symantec-branded Veritas Storage Foundation Basic and/or the Endpoint Protection Amazon Machine Image with their newly deployed cloud-based infrastructure.

Like other AMIs run on Amazon EC2, customers who sign up for either Veritas Storage Foundation Basic or Endpoint Protection pay a monthly subscription charge of $4.99, plus a per-hour charge starting at 15 cents depending on size of the instance, to Amazon, Magee said.

Symantec currently offers the two applications as a cloud-based subscription through Amazon EC2, Magee said. "But as this model unfolds, there will be more partners," he said.

The Symantec applications are available directly to Amazon EC2 users, but solution providers familiar with cloud computing can help customers take advantage of the Amazon cloud, Magee said.