1 Introduction
Symantec Corporation is a multinational technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California, USA. Founded in 1982, the company had a long and turbulent history of numerous mergers, acquisitions and corporate reorganizations. After entering the antivirus market in early 90s, Symantec has been increasingly focusing on information security, gradually evolving into one of the global leaders in this field. Although for a long period the company has offered a wide range of products and services in other areas, such as storage, backup and information management, in 2015 a strategic decision was made to split the company into two independent entities, with the reestablished Veritas Corporation taking over the information management solutions and Symantec continuing to focus solely on security.
With over 12000 employees in over 35 countries, the new Symantec remains one of the leading vendors in cyber security, a Fortune 500 company and a member of the S&P 500 stock market index. For many years, the company has maintained the leading position in the antivirus and malware protection market both for enterprise customers and consumers under the well-known Norton brand. With over 175 million protected endpoints, the company operates the world’s largest threat intelligence network. In addition to threat protection, Symantec offers solutions in areas like data loss prevention, encryption and strong authentication. With the recent acquisition of Blue Coat Systems, the company’s portfolio now incorporates advanced web and cloud security products as well.
As cybercriminals are constantly developing increasingly sophisticated attacks that combine multiple threat vectors and may remain undetected for months, traditional security tools are becoming less and less effective against new challenges. The industry’s response to them is the new generation of security analytics solutions that are able to collect and analyze large amounts of security data across the whole enterprise in real time utilizing the recent developments in Big Data and machine learning. These solutions are capable of detecting suspicious activities in hours if not minutes instead of months, giving security experts powerful automated tools for forensic analysis and quick remediation of uncovered security incidents.
The acquisition of Blue Coat Systems in August 2016 has allowed Symantec to significantly strengthen their technology and product portfolio. By combining Symantec’s traditional strengths in areas like endpoint and email security with Blue Coat’s advanced network and cloud security offerings, the company is aiming to provide unified protection, detection and remediation across all cyberthreat vectors, help customers to move to the cloud securely and further increase and consolidate investments into cybersecurity and threat research.
Although the new company’s vision of a fully integrated product portfolio is still a thing of the future, even in its current form, Symantec Advanced Threat Protection provides an impressive integrated security platform combining both traditional threat detection methods (which have been the company’s core expertise for many years) with the next-generation security analytics and threat intelligence across three major attack vectors: endpoints, networks and email.
This approach can be especially beneficial for existing Symantec customers, since the new platform leverages existing Endpoint Protection and Email Security products from the company’s portfolio, thus reducing the costs and deployment efforts.
