Symantec Endpoint Security Complete: Choose the Best

As malware and ransomware attacks spike to new highs in 2023, businesses face a worsening security crisis. The dramatic shift to mobile and remote work in the last year-and-a-half has also invited the attention of cyber criminals regularly probing endpoints – everything from laptops and smartphones to Internet of Things devices – to discover security weaknesses that will allow them to bypass traditional security defenses.

Endpoints now constitute the frontlines of the battle. But while managing endpoint protection is vital, simply throwing money at the problem won’t be enough to achieve success. With – literally – thousands of endpoints to monitor and protect, enterprises need accurate assessments in real-time so they have a fighting chance to eliminate cyber threats before they become attacks. That means developing a comprehensive approach with broad coverage, centralized control, and efficient remediation to protect against the increasing incidence and sophistication of malware and ransomware. With increasing threats, enterprises must be more efficient than ever. Security budgets don’t scale linearly with rising threats, so getting value from your security solution is more important than ever.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with enterprise returns on their endpoint security investments, Symantec by Broadcom, commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ study, interviewing four customers with experience using Symantec Endpoint Security Complete (SES) Complete. The goal was to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of SES Complete on their organizations. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the experiences of the interviewed customers and combined the results into a single composite organization.

Key Findings

After their investment in SES Complete, the customers reported a myriad of operational and security gains that can be quantified in the following way:

• Total Return on Investment (ROI): The composite organization experienced an impressive three-year, 437% ROI, based on benefits versus costs.
• Cost avoidance of a security breach: With a breach sometimes costing an organization several million dollars, Forrester calculated that the increased efficacy of the SES Complete solution allows an organization to avoid an average expense of $1.25 million per year. The three-year risk-adjusted present value (PV) of this benefit totals $3.5 million.
• Consolidation and simplification of security stack: Upon adoption of the SES Complete solution, add-on endpoint protection tools were no longer required. Since the implementation of SES Complete, interviewees commented that their organizations now spend ten percent less on other security application licenses. With an average total spend of $5 million, the annual savings is $500,000 per year. The three-year, risk-adjusted PV of this benefit is just over $1 million.
• Efficiencies in remediation time: With the improved automation provided by the EDR feature, information bottlenecks caused by the need for manual attention and intervention are greatly reduced. Now only the highest priority threats require intervention.  The visibility and analytics included in the solution help the security team address issues proactively, allowing security and IT team members to focus on more strategic tasks. The combined annual savings is more than $300,000 per year, resulting in a three-year, risk-adjusted PV of $775,525.

Other unquantifiable benefits underscored the gains that accrued to the security organization. Those benefits are detailed in the study.

ROI Feedback

In terms of day-to-day use, the deployment of SES Complete had other follow-through ramifications for total ROI. 

One interviewee noted: “With fewer potential threats requiring attention, we have been able to eliminate the detection and remediation bottleneck that existed in our previous system. Now only the highest priority threats require attention, indicated along with the relevant analytics that make the remediation process much more efficient and effective.” With immediate access to all information surrounding the threat, the security team was able to expedite the remediation process.   

Another interviewee noted: “The detect capability is many times stronger than what we had before. The visibility we have now compared to what we had before shows just how shockingly compromised we were from a risk perspective. SES Complete is a game changer for us when it comes to preventing future breaches.” 

You can read the full Forrester study here. Also, find out more about Symantec Endpoint Security and what it can do to help your endpoint ROI by listening to a replay of this webinar.