The Confident SMB

After a successful beta period, we are thrilled to share that Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Small Business Edition is now available! The feedback we have received from our partners and customers on the beta test has been extremely positive. Participants installed the beta on more than 14,000 endpoints and provided Symantec with input on everything from minor bug fixes to requests for new features and function changes.

Small businesses have become very appealing to cybercriminals, and it is more important than ever to deploy a technology like Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition . These days, businesses are not just confined to four walls. Employees are often in the field or traveling for their...

If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million times—hackers do not care what the size of your business is. They’re after your valuables, and SMBs are increasingly appealing targets because they usually have fewer cyber defenses. The results of Symantec’s 2011 Internet Security Threat Report certainly point to this trend, as I discussed in a post earlier this month.

Verizon’s 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report—released this week—tells a similar story. Verizon reports that while the total number of attacks is on the rise, the number of records exposed per breach declined. Cybercriminals are shifting their focus to small and medium businesses.

The folks from Symantec’s encryption team have weighed in on the report at the In Defense of Data blog. There are some very interesting insights...

With all of the options in the marketplace today, small businesses must secure customer trust and loyalty to remain competitive. Regardless of the industry, their customers are looking for the best quality, value and service and they will quickly move on if their needs are not met. They also want to know that their personal information, like their credit card numbers and bank account information, is protected when they deal with a small business.

Today, so much of our valuable information resides on computers. It’s how we work. So it is expected that small businesses would be concerned about keeping their customers’ personal and financial information safe. In fact, according to the recent Symantec 2010 SMB Information Protection survey, almost three-quarters of SMBs are somewhat/extremely concerned about the loss of crucial business information. This does not come as a surprise when you consider that 42 percent have actually lost confidential or proprietary...

In Small Business environments the "IT administrator" often wears many hats from Desktop, Network, Security, Backup and the list goes on and on. In other cases the IT administrator is actually the operations or support manager or even better the CEO of the company. I think all companies should sincerely spend IT Admin Appreciation day July 30th this year (http://www.sysadminday.com/) appreciating the IT admins contribution to the business. 

 But I digress. So, recognizing how overburdened IT Administrators are, SEP SBE 12.0 was designed to reduce the day to day overhead of the administrator. Rather than logging into the management console to get security status information, the product is designed to contact the administrator and report on issues and problems periodically.

 So how does that work?

This is primarily...