IT professionals know all too well, that managing their endpoint infrastructure is a challenging task. With growing businesses, organisations now face a threat that involves financially motivated attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in endpoint devices. The endpoints refer to all enterprise workstations, laptops and kiosks.
A number of devices are also connected to endpoints; media players, smartphones, printers, scanners, removable hard-drives and other portable storage devices, giving mobility to the data.
Traditionally, administrators install at each endpoint anti-virus, anti-spyware, desktop firewall, intrusion prevention and device control technologies. These security products might be from different companies increasing the IT complexity, management time and costs.
Also, organisations have to provide training and support for security solutions. Nowadays many attacks on IT data can evade traditional security solutions, leaving organisations vulnerable to data theft, hacking and disruption of business-critical services.
Re-designed solution
Making note of this, Symantec has engineered a new product; a re-architectured, re-designed version that sums up all the benefits. “This solution provides endpoint protection for advanced threat prevention from targeted attacks as well as attacks not seen before,” says Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Symantec India. The new solution consolidates all of the endpoint protection technologies in one single software named as Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0. The software is specially created for enterprises, to be launched worldwide early October, this year.
Benefits
“Inspite of having all levels of security control in-built in the software, its environment is simplified and managed using a single central console,” informs Mr Dhupar.
“The software occupies about 21 MB space, which is less than traditionally used security solutions,” he mentions. Also Mr Dhupar says that the software is network ready, easy to manage and deploy.
The software has abilities that include proactive technologies to automatically analyse application behaviours and network communications to block suspicious activities. This also allows administrators to deny specific device and application activities deemed as high risk for the organisation.
They can even block specific actions based on the location of the user. In the case of an infected endpoint, security products repair the damage by disinfecting or quarantining the system. The remediation process is then completed by deploying the necessary patch.
Awareness
Currently the scenario in India is that over 40 per cent of the computers do not even have anti-virus programmes installed.
 Cases of extortion, fraud and intellectual property theft occurred in one of every 5 to 6 Indian companies last year, which is nearly quadruple times to the rest of the world. “The need of the hour is to create awareness about the benefits of security tools,” feels Mr Dhupar. This is absolutely essential for organisations to be productive, he adds.
The price of the product has not been fixed yet.
But to give an idea Mr Dhupar explains, “We recently launched a product on the similar lines for consumers, priced at Rs 3,699 for three usages (3 people can use one copy).”
But for enterprises they might have to buy licenses depending on the size of the enterprise.