By Feris Rifai, Founder and CEO of Bay Dynamics

As a Symantec technology partner, one of the trends that continues to persist among our customers is the growing adoption of virtualization technology. Virtual servers and desktops are becoming more than just a novelty; they are changing the way businesses function. With a vast amount of benefits – including cost-savings and greater efficiency -- more and more businesses are increasing their investment in virtualization deployments. The bottom line is -- it is critical for our business that we offer products and services that help our customers maintain their security posture while continuing to evolve and adopt new technologies in order to meet growing customer demand.

Virtualization presents a particular challenge as businesses are looking to secure both physical and virtual environments simultaneously; previously, this would require organizations to...

We have exciting news about Symantec Endpoint Protection 12deployments in the field. We have now successfully deployed more than one million endpoints worldwide in the 86 days since the product became generally available on July 5, 2011. 37% of these endpoints are new installations, and 63% are migrations from previous versions of Symantec Endpoint Protection. The feedback from customers and partners, from small to large enterprise organizations, has been very positive. Many additional large customers plan to go live in the next few months based on this success and based on their testing of the product in their physical and virtual environments.

If you’re still using Symantec Endpoint Protection 11, it’s a great time to upgrade.  More than 1 million machines are already being protected, and...

Summertime! That means sunshine, travel…and additional data threats to your smartphone. What’s that? You don’t consider mobile security risks and summertime as going hand in hand? Well, consider this: As you and your employees take some well-deserved time off, will you be taking smartphones with you? Of course you will. And chances are you will be accessing corporate data. In fact, a recent Symantec survey on security habits of mobile device users revealed that 62 percent of corporate smartphone users access sensitive corporate information while on vacation, and 81 percent will at least be checking their business email accounts.

With a variety of looming threats, from unsecured networks to malicious apps, corporate smartphone users should carefully consider what they can do to make sure a vacation from the office doesn’t turn into a vacation from security. The following best practices will help you keep mobile devices secure.

• Use the...

Gartner just released their annual report on endpoint security (see: Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, Gartner, 2010)

As you can read in the report, Symantec extended its lead both in terms of vision and ability to execute.  What is really notable, however, is the strong statement Gartner made about the future of endpoint security.  The reports starts with an indictment, "Malware effectiveness continues to accelerate, while vendors are busy polishing increasingly ineffective solutions and doing little to fundamentally reduce the attack surface and protect users."

Gartner goes on to state, "Signature-based malware detection has been limping along on life support for...