Leading the way in Network and Information Security

As we close the books on 2020, it would be more than a slight understatement to describe the last 12 months as unique. 

Entering the year, enterprises faced the ongoing complexities of cyber threats, as they continued to drive their digital transformation to evolve their business.  Suddenly, global enterprises found themselves grappling with the enormous security implications of a world turned upside down by a global pandemic. For Symantec’s Network and Information security business, our priority was to deliver a data centric approach to support an organization’s digital transformation and the escalated requirements associated with protecting a remote workforce. All the while, we were undergoing our own historic, if not transformative year, as Symantec finished its integration into Broadcom. 

I’m pleased to report that we achieved our objectives on both fronts. Let me touch on some of the highlights and offer a few thoughts about our direction for 2021.

The pandemic was – hopefully – a once-in-a-generation event that scrambled everyone’s best-laid plans. Seemingly overnight, it required organizations to establish secure work-from-home arrangements and accelerate their digital transformation plans.

For Symantec, capitalizing on our Integrated Cyber Defense (ICD) strategy to design and integrate our products to address key digital transformation use cases such as SASE and Zero Trust, to help meet  the demands of  a growing remote workforce, while supporting the increased complexities of security regulatory compliance & privacy were the hallmarks of our year.  

Enabling a Data Centric Digital Transformation

Unfortunately, the reality is that security has been disrupted to the point where we live in a world where you don't control the perimeter any longer.  No matter what device or WiFi network you’re using, you have to assume that it’s just not safe without extra security. With this in mind, we accelerated our focus on our data centric approach to deliver a single solution across network and information security.  This helps ensure customers are able to carry out their various digital transformation projects and associated remote workforce challenges safely. Focusing across our leading Secure Web Gateway and DLP offerings, we had many key deliverables, including:

• Integrated Web and DLP gateways, and Endpoint, Web and CASB agent architectures to simplify deployment and reduce latency
• Support for user risk analytics and remediation across Web and Cloud DLP
• Migration to Google Cloud to deliver hyper-scale network and edge services 
• Redesign of the SWG portal user interface for single-pass processing policy integrations
• Deployed both WSS and DLP re-architectured agents supporting macOS Big Sur that further extended coverage to include remote work scenarios
• Integrated DLP and CASB architecture while implementing telemetry enhancements that enable customers to measure adoption and aid in troubleshooting
• Incorporated risk analytics into core DLP to simplify forensics and remediation 
• Integrated with Microsoft Information Protection for data classification and encryption

What’s Next

2021 will be busy, even as COVID winds down, as we deliver market leading solutions to keep enterprises secure.  We will continue to focus on innovation and integration to provide better cyber security to meet the complex needs of the global enterprise as they execute their digital transformation journey across on-prem, cloud & hybrid. Now that our integration into Broadcom is complete, we will focus our R&D and engineering talent, the best in the industry, to meet our customers’ key security use cases.  Our Network and Information Security solutions are better than ever and our focus on customer driven innovation will address their biggest challenges, today and in the future. As our customers continue their digital transformation journey, we are going to be there for them, every step of the way.