We see it in the news almost every day. Businesses unable to serve their customers because their network is down or they have lost business-critical data.  It’s not an enterprise problem. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are also waking up and realizing that they can protect themselves by implementing backup technologies that allow them to keep their operations running even in the event of an outage.

Backup has evolved from a luxury to a necessity, other technologies are progressing rapidly. Let’s consider  virtualization. Virtualization improves IT flexibility by creating a central pool of resources, allowing for rapid provisioning of services on demand. It can reduce costs by avoiding the need to purchase and maintain storage and server hardware that are only needed for times of peak demand. In short, it improves almost every aspect of IT operations – except backup.

As SMBs increasingly embrace virtualization, they are forced to...

In collaboration with the SECURITY RESPONSE TEAM

As we predicted toward the end of last year, we’re already seeing an upswing in ransomware activity in 2013. The ransomware extortion scam has been in existence now for a number of years, but its popularity among cybercriminals has grown over the last two years and it continues to indiscriminately plague computer users in greater numbers. These attacks have evolved from website graffiti, to malware, to destruction or theft of business critical information, and more recently to extortion. SMBs are particularly vulnerable to these types of attacks because many don’t have the necessary IT resources or backups to recover hijacked assets. To help customers and partners better understand these attacks, Symantec has tracked this growing menace in various ...

Virtualization provides a lot of opportunities and advantages for SMBs.  They can reduce their capital and operating expenses and use fewer servers for the same number of applications.  But many SMBs are unfamiliar with virtualization and that was the key driver behind our latest SMB Twitter chat.

Last week, Symantec’s SMB security experts, Dan Nadir and Elias AbuGhazaleh, engaged with Small Business Trends’ Editor-in-Chief Anita Campbell for a Twitter chat about what SMBs need to know about virtualization. The chat covered a variety of topics including benefits, challenges, and how to get started. 

The chat drew more than 100 participants which included SMB owners and thought leaders; and it produced more than 550 Tweets.  Most importantly, we listened and learned a lot from SMBs directly: We learned they’re eager to take advantage of the benefits of virtualized technology and hungry for...

Almost every enterprise IT environment is running a virtual machine, and in recent years, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have shown a strong interest in virtualization.  They read about it and see other businesses enjoying the benefits, but are unsure exactly how it works and how to successfully adopt it within their own organizations. The 2012 Symantec Disaster Preparedness Survey revealed that SMB are beginning to understand and implement virtualization technologies but still have a long way to go.

Join Symantec’s SMB and virtualization experts, as well as Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends on Thursday, January 17 at 1:00 p.m. PT / 4:00 p.m. ET to chat about what SMBs need to know about going virtual with their technology.

SMBs need to understand virtualization—the advantages...