I’m excited to see so many changes going on in the areas of cyber security. Our leadership recognizes the future trend of organizations needing to drive intelligent security instead of the older concept of just layering products to address individual issues, which I think responds well to a world where people are realizing that there’s no single solution or product, no ‘silver bullet’ that will keep their organization safe. Even the threats themselves are evolving, with malware coders actively adjusting their attacks with every patch and signature the good guys put out. We’ve built this awareness into our whole security strategy at Symantec, and as our fiscal year comes to a close I can look back on what we’ve done and where we’re going with real enthusiasm.
Looking backward, in the last 12 months in Managed Security Services we’ve re-architected how we handle and process big data to provide a uniform data input structure. We challenged our engineering team to be more flexible, and come up with a method of speeding up our adoption of new technologies and vendor upgrades as well as increasing our ability to do more complex correlated queries on the fly. With that major change completed in April, we turned to look at how we could enhance our customer experience in onboarding and every day portal use.
We listened to our customers express their need for faster boarding times; we simplified our boarding procedures by creating checklists and video instructions, eliminating handoffs between teams, providing a plug-and-play hardware appliance, and improving our documentation; all of this is supported by real-time troubleshooting that responds to the customer’s questions in minutes rather than hours or days. In December we had a portal update providing customers new self-service tools for both in MSS and DeepSight. We understand that a security professional needs to be able to look both inward at what’s going on in their environment as well as looking out both to see how their environment looks to the rest of the world, and what threat landscape elements will most likely affect them. Finally, we’re looking at restructuring the service organization to improve our customer focus, both to support our new tools and to increase our knowledge and understanding of each customer’s environment.
Our roadmap for 2014 is very exciting to us, and we’re looking forward to the continuing enhancements and new offerings to come including our integration with technology in Advanced Persistent Threat detection. It’s important for us to detect, prioritize, and respond to sophisticated targeted attacks on our customers’ ecosystems, and we’re committed to integrating our new capabilities with those of the cutting-edge vendors in the marketplace. Another new release here in North America is the introduction of our Incident Response team for on-site customer forensic investigations. We see the wealth of security information, malicious actor profiles, and experience of our incident response team as a natural supplement for customers to accelerate their security response to threats. This capability will be expanding globally as we find the right partners geographically that we can work with to augment the Symantec security analysts who lead the teams to find that perfect balance of local knowledge and talent with Symantec expertise and methodology.
In the end, it’s more than just compliance and regulations that drives this security community we all share – it’s passion, and a sincere desire to make the world a better, safer place for people to do business and live their lives online.