Imagine the scene: a free-standing data center is perched precariously on the ledge of a building, 250 feet off the ground. It hovers there momentarily – and then plummets through the air, landing at a speed of 120ft/sec, with a deafening crash.

Seconds later, with the debris of the wrecked DC scattered in all directions, a second, identical data center, up on that same roof, effects a full recovery of the data and application. Symantec’s experiment in disaster recovery has been a resounding success.

The point being that businesses need 24/7 availability of their data and applications to keep their operations running smoothly and customers happy – which puts a major strain on organisations to maintain that level of service constantly.  Not only must they be ready for the worst case scenario of their data centers suddenly being out of action. They need to be able to recover the situation – fast.

It was with this in mind that Symantec...

As head of the Field Technology Sales organisation for Symantec in EMEA, I find myself in some extraordinarily interesting meetings. None more so than a recent half-day workshop with our technology peers at VMware down at Frimley in Camberley.

It was a meeting of minds from a group of extremely passionate individuals — and an ideal opportunity to brainstorm big ideas to resolve some of the challenges that are stopping our customers from virtualising more of their physical infrastructure.  Two of the greatest challenges right now: Regulatory compliance and the cloud, which resulted in two great use cases, which we can solve today.

The first major use cases to emanate from the workshop was the whole issue of security in a virtualised environment. Talk turned to the retail sector. Retailers large and small need to establish a security baseline across their virtual IT environment that protects payment card information, in order to meet the...

The August edition of the Symantec Intelligence report provides the latest analysis of cyber security threats, trends, and insights from the Symantec Intelligence team concerning malware, spam, and other potentially harmful business risks. The data used to compile the analysis for this report includes data from May 2011 through August 2012.

Report highlights

• Spam – 72.3 percent (an increase of 4.7 percentage points since July)
• Phishing – One in 312.9 emails identified as phishing (an increase of 0.109 percentage points since July)
• Malware – One in 233.1 emails contained malware (a decrease of 0.14 percentage points since July)
• Malicious Web sites – 1 website blocked per day (a decrease of 49.8 percent since July)
• The state of data breaches to date in 2012
• A look at a malicious email scam that pretends to come from Symantec
• A new Java zero-day vulnerability appears in...

Keyboard finger trouble again! I just sent around a 10MB slide presentation to 25 people on cc when I meant to only send it to one person. That’s another 250MB added to data storage somewhere down the line. Still, it’s a drop in the ocean compared with the amount of data growth worldwide. Pick up any analyst report, magazine, or survey and even the most conservative estimates put the rate of growth at around 60 percent per annum; and it is even higher for companies with data-intensive applications, in high-growth markets, or with widely distributed data centres or staff.

As I travel across EMEA talking to customers—right the way from top 20 global organisations down to SMBs—more and more of them think they have found the ‘holy grail’ to controlling this data growth. They think they’ve finally found a mechanism to stop buying storage for all that data emanating from their physical and virtual platforms, mobile, and Cloud. It’s...