Symantec aims to make businesses more resilient against attacks

Information and data play a critical role in our personal lives and drive our businesses. Securing and managing that information is becoming more important and more challenging with the increase of potential cyber threats.

At yesterday’s Westcon event in Auckland, global leader in security, storage and systems management solutions Symantec discussed how organisations can minimise the risks against new and emerging threats, and how an organisation can become cyber resilient.

Klasie Holtzhausen, Symantec senior director of Pacific Channel Sales, says organisations need to accept that in these modern times, it is inevitable that attackers will get into their systems. Attackers can spend months, if not years, planning to get into organisations.

“Hackers do plenty of research to figure people out and exploit human nature”, he says.

Symantec is trying to convince companies that they need to upgrade their systems and do more when threats are discovered.

Organisations need a fourstep plan – plan, prevent, detect & respond, and recover - to prevent attacks and make their organisations more resilient when they do happen.

Organisations are already heavily invested in protection security, but protection is no longer good enough. Detection is the next piece organisations need in order to protect their business from hackers.

Holtzhausen says that helping C-level executives understand and mitigate risks is one of the biggest challenges for IT security experts. People in the IT world already understand the threats to critical data and know how to protect and recover it should it be compromised. In comparison, he says the business world does not yet understand the risks.

Holtzhausen says that in order to start teaching businesses about the potential impacts of security threats, businesses need to first educate their staff. “People are always going to open emails or click on links they shouldn’t.”

Symantec’s protection systems are strong on desktop and server applications, and they partner strongly with other vendors to deliver network security.

Holtzhausen says there is a big push towards the cloud business model and that New Zealand has a much higher adoption rate than other parts of the world.

Symantec brings together software and cloud solutions that work across multiple platforms, allowing customers to access, store and transmit information from anywhere at any time.

He says that if businesses aren’t looking to incorporate the cloud into their business models, they will miss out on opportunities. “Unless the vendor is flexible at recognising the cloud as a route to market, they’ll get locked out of opportunities”.

Holtzhausen says a partnership with Westcon has given Symantec another route to market, and yesterday’s event has allowed them to speak to organisations about emerging threats and the general trends and behaviours they should be wary of.