Symantec Vision 2006 opens today

Kevin Isaac, Symantec's Regional Director, Middle East and North Africa, delivered the keynote address where he advised delegates that innovation in new technology is broadening information transfer and access channels, making protection and security of access statutory for enterprise through to end users.

"Innovation is fastest in the consumer space with consumers embracing new models and new technology with increasing ease," Isaac added. "Consumers are dragging innovation into the workplace with blogs, instant messaging and VoIP and take mobility and usability for granted.

"This necessitates heightened sensitivity toward data leakage, the efficiency of an organisation's infrastructure, and compliance to both government and corporate policies, which in turn increases the need for data protection."

Isaac added that Symantec's solutions are designed in order to provide the necessary protection required by organisations to keep their infrastructure up and running without sacrificing access to critical information.

"Increasing data usage trends in both consumer and enterprise spaces means we have to focus on virtualization," added Isaac. "Software as a service (SaaS) and service oriented architectures (SOA)."

Virtualisation is a new platform for innovation below the operating system (OS). The hypervisor layer is a place where innovation in security, availability, storage and other domains can benefit any guest OS, be centrally controlled, and be isolated from OS details and potential attackers and software failures.

"The confluence of increased bandwidth, broadband to the home, local computer capability to mask latency, and web technologies like AJAX have made SaaS not only possible but attractive. SaaS has many compelling benefits including cost effective deployment, rapid introduction of new features, and it also shifts the support burden to the provider, who is now responsible for the upgrades, patch installation, hardware upgrades and so on,"

said Isaac.

According to Isaac, SOA are becoming increasingly interesting inside the firewall and to build composite applications even between businesses. It is possible now for coarse scale integration of applications and services into composite business services. In addition to this composability benefit, SOA also can speed implementation and integration and allows for reuse.

"Symantec Vision 2006 will elaborate on how the corporation's data centre, data management, security and consumer products work together in order to protect infrastructure, information and interaction. With a wide breadth of platform support, technology, market leadership and industry-leading tools, Symantec is better positioned to optimise operations and enhance performance of applications now more than ever before," he concluded.