Symantec Web Security Service: Marking a Year of Resiliency and Progress

At the outset of 2020, few, if anyone, anticipated a massive, practically overnight paradigm shift in web security. It’s been that kind of a year, of course, a black swan, once-in-a-century storm, notable for disruptions and accelerated digital transformation. Far from rattled, we boosted our resiliency while making headway in product development. 

Let me update you on our progress. One year ago, we began our Broadcom journey confident that it would equip us with the R&D firepower and the necessary resources to amplify our web services offerings. And we needed it. As the COVID-19 shutdowns upended on-premises enterprise security paradigms, we logged a 333% increase in agent use to our cloud Secure Web Gateway (SWG).

The immediate challenge? Helping many of our customers achieve a secure digital transformation in a matter of weeks—instead of months or years. Our customers aimed to protect their remote workers without backhauling traffic to their data centers. Using cloud-delivered SWG, we promptly shifted their deployment with universal policy enforcement, sparing them both the cost and hassle of rewriting their access-control policies.

Time to Value

Since then we’ve made timely investments in our hosting infrastructure that will provide our customers with even quicker time to value. We introduced a portfolio licensing agreement that broadens and improves our product access. And we’re making enormous strides in our industry-leading SASE solution. 

First, the cloud. We’ve worked overtime this year to rapidly migrate our systems to better support our customers and partners. It’s difficult to rank them, but here are five great reasons we tapped Google Cloud to host our global Web Security Service (WSS), along with all other Broadcom cloud services:

• Elastic scale and improved resilience
• Increased focus on cyber security innovation
• Quicker deployment of new services
• Reduced reliance on congested public internet routes
• Increase quantity and scope of infrastructure certifications

In other words, we’re building a comprehensively better experience both for you and for our support team, too. Google Cloud will focus on networking services while we focus on security services.

One way we know the platform is working: we see reduced latency between our integrated services. Plus, we can add scale and spin up features in hours versus the days or weeks it might have taken with our own data centers.

The Road to SASE

According to Gartner, “network security architectures that place the enterprise data center at the center of connectivity requirements are an inhibitor to the dynamic access requirements of digital business.”¹

Gartner also added that to achieve low-latency, “enterprises need SASE offerings with a worldwide fabric of points of presence (POPs) and peering relationships.”¹ We’ve checked off that box for you. Now, customers can peer with WSS via Google peering points in nearly 200 public internet exchanges.

In March we noted that SASE is introducing a new architecture for a new era. We’re very focused on making this vision come true. Now we’re providing new Symantec, a division of Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO), CloudSOC CASB capabilities to Symantec Intelligence Services subscribers within Symantec SWG — market-leading functionality at no additional charge.

With this step, we’re making it easier to write controls that govern what users can or cannot do within SaaS apps. We see CASB as another important step along the path to an integrated SASE experience, and more capabilities are coming. The timing is right: SASE’s security policies are tied to validating identities rather than location. 

That’s one reason why we’re stepping up our investment in SASE: it is defining our product roadmap and organizational structure.  

What are your organization’s cyber security priorities heading into 2021? Watch this space as we continue to rapidly scale our industry-leading SASE deployment. To learn more about what we’ve been up to, check out the on-demand WSS webinar below.

* * *

¹ Source: "The Future of Network Security Is in the Cloud” Neil Macdonald, Lawrence Orans, Joe Skorupa, Aug 2019