Symantec and Amazon team on enterprise security

Global security, storage and systems management solutions provider Symantec is offering its next-generation security and enterprise-class storage management solutions through the Amazon elastic compute cloud (Amazon EC2).

Under the agreement, Symantec end-point protection and Veritas storage foundation basic are now available on Amazon EC2. Symantec solutions will provide that essential additional protection to businesses' Windows servers in the cloud.

These solutions assure comprehensive threat prevention and aid companies to easily manage their cloud storage online. A single toolset will now deliver reliability, scalability and high performance required by businesses.

Pay-as-you-go option

Customers can use Symantec end-point protection and Veritas storage foundation basic in the form of custom Amazon machine images (AMIs). Users have the option to run Symantec provided instances on Amazon EC2 on a pay-as-you-go, hourly basis.

Greg Hughes, group president, enterprise product group, Symantec, noted that many businesses have begun to leverage the cloud for applications and services. These companies protect and manage those environments with the security and storage management solutions they are used to from Symantec.

Symantec is committed to provide value in the cloud, said Hughes. To fulfill its promise, it is taking the same proven security and storage management solutions that organisations have come to rely on in their data centre and extending them to Amazon EC2.

Steve Rabuchin, general manager of developer relations and business development for Amazon Web services (AWS) noted Amazon EC2 as a Web service that provides resizable compute capability on demand. This service simplifies Web-scale computing for customers of all sizes.

This agreement will ensure that Symantec's and Amazon's mutual customers can extend familiar Symantec security and online storage management solutions to the AWS cloud.

Non-disruptive storage operations

Amazon EC2 users will be able to access valuable protection technologies offered by Symantec end-point protection, which uniquely combines Symantec AntiVirus with advanced threat prevention. This combination is able to protect companies against dangerous attacks.

These users will also benefit from advanced online storage management capabilities provided by Symantec's Veritas storage foundation basic solution. Amazon EC2 users can not only manage multiple hosts from a central interface but also optimise storage performance and availability online.

The companies refer to the experience of a customer, David Jordan, chief information security officer of Arlington County in Virginia, US.

“We have been running Symantec end-point protection locally to secure the end-points and servers in our computing environment and have been very pleased with the level of protection it has provided,” said Jordan. “As our infrastructure becomes more of a mix between on-premise and off-premise offerings, we look forward to leveraging these new delivery models for security and storage solutions.”