By Brian Burch, Vice President of Americas Marketing for SMB at Symantec

Most people agree that small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are a significant source of the innovation that fuels growth, but a lesser recognized fact is the critical role of start-ups in economic recovery. A new report from the Kauffman Foundation indicates that the pace of recovery in hiring and job creation since 2008 is stronger in newer firms – 4 out of every 10 hires at young firms are for newly created jobs.

Supporting small businesses, established and new, in their development and growth is germane to the economy. A major part of small businesses’ success now and in the future will increasingly derive from their business relationships with large corporations. More large...

Ask any IT administrator about the cloud, especially cloud-based applications, and chances are you’ll sense some unease. They see its potential in terms of cost-effectiveness and agility, but express some concerns in terms of security. At Symantec we envision a future, cloud-centric world, where clouds are safe and our solutions provide the protection and control customers need across both public and private clouds.

In this vision, many clouds will be the norm. The user experience will involve a seamless interaction of cloud-based services with constant access to what is needed, when needed, without security concerns. Whether it is access to email archives, sales presentations, or financial reports, secure cloud-based services will enable customers to be more productive wherever they may be.

There are some challenges to overcome before we get to the point where all companies will feel safe migrating enormous petabytes of...

With IT budgets that are shrinking or barely holding steady, it’s vital for today’s businesses to make the most of their current infrastructure. Fortunately, however, leveraging virtual infrastructure to enable cloud computing is possible without having to rip and replace the entire infrastructure. Whether an organization is replacing legacy technologies or adapting them to virtualization, Symantec and VMware have teamed up to help businesses make the transition to virtualization as smoothly as possible – with approximately 100 points of integration to date.

This integration effort goes beyond simply enabling the technologies to work together, to the IT users themselves. We have developed various integration levels ranging from...

The last few days I spent some time to digest the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report Volume 17. This comprehensive report provides an overview and analysis of the year 2011 in global threat activity. The report is based on data from the Global Intelligence Network, which Symantec's analysts use to identify, analyze, and provide commentary on emerging trends in attacks, malicious code activity, phishing, and spam.

I am an active member of the Cloud Security Alliance Mobile Working Group, where we actually do research on secure mobile endpoint computing, which will result into valuable guidelines to be published this year. Therefore my Threat Report reading was likely shorten through the lens of...