Symantec (Nasdaq: SYMC) announced the upcoming release of its Endpoint Protection 12 product as the company works to bring faster protection, more effectiveness and simplicity to the security market.
Blake McConnell, senior manager of product management, SMB security solutions at Symantec, said the Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 12.1 solution meets three key needs of small businesses: speed, simplicity and effectiveness.
“Endpoint Protection offers fastest performance around things like boot time, memory utilization and application launch time,” McConnell said.
Since the solution is powered by Symantec’s Insight and Sonar technologies, Endpoint Protection 12 has the ability to “stop malware that hasn’t been seen before” in addition to being able to look at different processes for abnormalities, McConnell explained.
“Insight is an enabling technology that provides proactive protection against mutating threats or malware that’s changing,” McConnell said. “Insight puts files into context using their age, frequency, location, etc. to expose threats that are otherwise missed. Sonar technology monitors 400 different application behaviours to enable faster scans.”
Randy Cochran, senior vice-president, channel sales for the Americas at Symantec, said that while Insight technology is new to Symantec’s Endpoint Protection product family, it’s not new to its Norton family of products, which target consumers.
“We’ve had this technology out for four years and we’re now putting it in a commercial vehicle to push it out to our small, medium and large customers,” Cochran said.
Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition is compatible with both Windows and Mac environments and the enterprise version of the product is available for Windows, Mac and Linux environments.
One of the main differences between the Small Business Edition and the enterprise edition is around custom configurability and the availability of advanced features like application control, McConnell said.
“We know that especially with our small business customers, they want a solution that works,” Cochran said. “They also want a solution that’s simple to use and this offering meets these criteria. The product is easy to deploy in as little as just 20 minutes.”
Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Small Business Edition is designed for companies between five and 99 employees and the enterprise offering is designed for organizations of 100 or more employees.
Cochran said there’s a private beta taking place now for Endpoint Protection 12 and the public beta is scheduled for April, with a general availability date set for summer 2011.
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.
