Symantec Moving Beyond Security Into Network Management

Cupertino, Calif. - Symantec is looking to expand the company's focus beyond security to provide technology for general network management, according to Stephen Cullen, senior vice president, security products and solutions.
"We're moving toward this idea of what we call 'information integrity.' You have to have your information secured but also have your information available," Cullen said in an interview with Security Pipeline at Symantec corporate headquarters here this week.

Information integrity drove Symantec's recent acquisitions of PowerQuest and On Technology, which provided backup and recovery, drive imaging, partition management, patch management, and asset inventory management technology, Cullen said. And information integrity will help drive future acquisitions, he said.

"The new direction is the convergence of security and administration. How do customers manage their network, how do they manage their storage, how do they manage their systems, how security overlays that," Cullen said.
As part of the company's traditional security focus, Symantec plans to improve remediation technology, to help customers recover from attacks, he said.

Symantec plans next month to close its acquisition of Brightmail. The goal with the Brightmail acquisition is to combine Symantec anti-virus with Brightmail anti-spam in software and hardware. Brightmail's anti-spam technology is integrated into hardware from IronPort and BorderWare, and those relationships will continue. Symantec will consider offering e-mail protection as a managed service as well, Cullen said.

Symantec will also develop technology to support e-mail filtering by content, allowing e-mail managers to set permitted and forbidden senders, e-mail recipients and content, he said.