On February 3rd 2016, Gartner published its 2016 edition Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP). Symantec hit another milestone by being a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for the 14th year in a row. In addition, we’re once again positioned the highest in the Ability to Execute. It is our belief that Symantec’s Magic Quadrant leadership position is an indication of a strong product offering that performs well in detection, protection and performance.
The report states that “Leaders demonstrate balanced progress and effort in all execution and vision categories” and that “Their capabilities in advanced malware protection, data protection and/or management features raise the competitive bar for all products in the market...” As a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Symantec continues to provide advanced protection with smart management to protect our customers against today’s sophisticated threats and sets a high benchmark for those who are in the market.
In addition, Gartner highlights that “Protection from common malware, as well as more Advanced Persistent Threats, is the top critical consideration for EPP buyers” and that “Protection from highly targeted, new and low-volume attacks requires a more proactive approach…” History has shown that no single approach will be successful for thwarting all types of malware attacks. EPP solutions must be more proactive and focus on the entire security life cycle, which is defined as having four stages: setting policy, prevention, detection and remediation.
At Symantec, we’ve long believed that customers benefit directly from a solution with more built-in features. For instance, Symantec™ Endpoint Protection (SEP) leverages a wide breadth of proprietary technologies, including IPS, reputation-based detection (Insight™), and real-time file behavioral monitoring (SONAR™) that applies machine-learning heuristics. These advanced protection technologies are working behind the scene to ensure that our customers are secure when facing unknown threats, mutating malware, or Zero-Day vulnerabilities. The built-in Application Control feature that “offers one-click lockdown via a whitelist or blacklist of applications” was also emphasized by Gartner. Moreover, Power Eraser, the advanced repair tool integrated in SEP, was another strength highlighted in Gartner’s report. SEP delivers unrivaled security by covering the three stages- setting policy, prevention, and remediation- of the security life cycle.
Last year, we introduced Symantec Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). With the ATP release, we addressed half of Gartner’s Cautions from last year’s Magic Quadrant report by enhancing proactive security and network-based sandboxing capabilities. It also extends the security lifecycle with EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) capabilities to help organizations better detect advanced threats and targeted attacks, drive down security operating expenses and incident response time by finding and prioritizing threats faster.
For server protection, Symantec Data Center Security (DCS) leverages VMware’s vShield APIs and NSX to offer “agentless” anti-malware and reputation security features on a VMware ESX hypervisor. Our DCS product also provides robust server hardening capability. In 2015, we released SEP for VDI for customers who require agentless anti-malware along with the full protection set available from SEP for their virtual machines. Our customers now have the option to go agentless for their virtual environments.
With the current threat landscape, blocking malicious infections with traditional antivirus is not enough. Organizations need to arm themselves with comprehensive attack prevention and to take a proactive approach in endpoint security, such as prioritizing threats with EDR solutions and reducing the attack surface via policy settings and application control. As a leader in Gartner’s EPP Magic Quadrant for 14 years, Symantec has demonstrated our determination in protecting the world’s people and information. We’re committed to continuous innovation in solving larger customer problems, enabling our customers to focus on growing their core businesses. Our leadership position is reflective of the broad portfolio of protection techniques and high efficacy, the ability to execute, and the completeness of vision. We encourage our customers, prospects and partners to review the latest research from Gartner and learn more about the best ways they can protect their environments and information from attacks.
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