Symantec drives collaboration to simplify cybersecurity

Cybersecurity company Symantec has announced that more than 120 companies have joined forces with Symantec to drive down the cost and complexity of cybersecurity, while improving response times to protect enterprises against sophisticated threats.

This includes major players like AWS, Box, IBM Security, Microsoft, Oracle, ServiceNow and Splunk, as well as dozens of other technology innovators, who are now building or delivering more than 250 products and services that integrate with Symantec's Integrated Cyber Defense (ICD) Platform.

This industry collaboration reflects a "platform shift" in the cybersecurity industry, as new research from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) shows enterprise customers are looking to consolidate vendors and adopt more integrated platforms backed by an open ecosystem.

Integrated defence improves security by increasing the speed and effectiveness, while greatly reducing the resources required.

To make that shift easier, Symantec also announced several features including a new universal data exchange, shared management capabilities, and upgraded data loss prevention software that helps customers stop untrusted apps before they compromise confidential data.

All are built on Symantec's ICD Platform, which provides a unified framework for information protection, threat protection, identity management and compliance across endpoints, networks, applications, and clouds.

"There's a shift happening in cybersecurity," says Symantec enterprise products executive vice president and GM Art Gilliland.

"The old way of fighting cyber attacks using fragmented tools has become too complex and expensive to manage. Integrated platforms are the future.

New research demonstrates the need for integrated platforms

ESG recently published new customer research showcasing how the lack of a cohesive security technology strategy creates real problems for enterprises, leading customers to seek more integrated platforms and fewer, more strategic vendors.

Key findings based on the research include:

• More than 80% of C-level executives said threat detection and response effectiveness is impacted by too many independent point tools

• 53% of organisations have a problematic shortage of cybersecurity staff and skills

• 91% of enterprises are actively consolidating or considering consolidating the cybersecurity vendors with whom they conduct business.

ESG senior principal analyst and fellow Jon Oltsik says, "Almost two-thirds of large enterprises surveyed use at least 25 different cybersecurity products. For security operations centres, managing disparate tools can be ineffective, costly, and time-consuming, especially considering the shortage of cybersecurity skills,

"This explains why CISOs are looking to consolidate and integrate their security infrastructure with platforms and open architectures that provide advanced developer support and deliver a partner ecosystem with robust third-party integrations.

Symantec started building ICD two and a half years ago with its acquisition of Blue Coat Systems, which added web and cloud security technologies to Symantec's market-leading endpoint, email and data loss prevention (DLP) technologies.

At the time, Symantec saw and heard that customers were spending enormous time and resources to integrate point technologies in order to derive real value from their cybersecurity investments.

So, the company invested in a strategy and roadmap to deliver an integrated platform that significantly reduces the cost of operations while improving the speed and accuracy of prevention, detection and response in order to reduce risk.

Since then, Symantec has:

• Invested significant R-D effort to integrate its products around key customer pain points – protecting information in SaaS applications; integrating complementary technologies like cloud access security broker (CASB) and DLP; enhancing endpoint security with advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR) to protect against targeted attacks; and securing infrastructure from endpoint to cloud for "Zero Trust" security implementations.

• Acquired security technologies like Fireglass, Skycure, Appthority, Javelin, and Luminate to address emerging challenges – and quickly integrated them into the Symantec portfolio.

• Deepened its services portfolio to provide security leaders with in-depth expertise in global threat intelligence, advanced threat monitoring, cyber readiness, and incident response.

• Opened its APIs and launched a Technology Integration Partner Program (TIPP) to do deeper integration work with key technology players.

Symantec now has more than 120 partners in TIPP, who are building or delivering more than 250 new applications and services that integrate with Symantec's ICD Platform, so enterprise customers can reduce the cost and complexity of their security operations.

In addition, Symantec is launching a new "Innovation Playground" program within TIPP to simplify integration with startups.

The new program will enable startup teams to leverage Symantec APIs and gain access to products, engineering resources, and customer innovation days.

Symantec is introducing three new technology innovations today that extend ICD for shared intelligence and shared management across multiple technology components, as well as new "threat aware" data protection capabilities:

• ICD Exchange: A universal data exchange that shares events, intelligence and actions across Symantec and third-party systems, improving visibility for security teams and security operations centres, so they can take faster action and increase automation.

• ICD Manager: Shared management capabilities that will provide customers with unified visibility into threats, policies and incidents, helping them to reduce incident response times from days to minutes.

• Data Loss Prevention 15.5: New data loss prevention (DLP) software that integrates with Symantec's market-leading endpoint protection suite to help customers stop untrusted apps before they compromise confidential data. This "threat aware" data protection is one of many breakthroughs made possible due to Symantec's ICD platform investments.