Symantec Releases Symantec Endpoint Protection 12

PRESS RELEASE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – July 6, 2011 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced the availability of Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 as well as results from independent tests demonstrating that the product outperforms the competition in both virtual and physical environments, providing unrivaled protection and blazingly fast performance. According to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report, attackers unleashed more than 286 million distinct malicious programs in 2010, creating a challenge for traditional signature-based security solutions that can’t keep up with this volume of attacks. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition are now available to combat the sheer volume of sophisticated attacks targeting organizations of all sizes today.

Click to Tweet: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 scans 50% faster & protects better than competitors in virtual environs: http://bit.ly/kc1aqk

Symantec engaged with a number of well-known third-party testing organizations to benchmark Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 against competing products in the areas of protection and performance. These tests evaluated products in both virtual environments, particularly highly consolidated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments, as well as physical environments. Recent testing performed by Dennis Labs demonstrates that Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 running in a VDI environment defended against more real-world threats than comparable solutions from McAfee and Trend Micro. In addition, The Tolly Group measured the performance of these solutions in VDI environments, determining that Symantec completes an on-demand scan in about half the time with 49 percent less disk bandwidth when compared to solutions from McAfee and Trend Micro. In addition, Symantec Endpoint Protection required 20 percent less disk bandwidth when performing on-access scanning compared to Trend Micro’s agentless DeepSecurity solution.

In real-world security tests performed by AV-Test.org in physical environments, Symantec protected better than comparable solutions from Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos and Trend Micro. In recent Passmark Software Performance Benchmarks, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 performed faster than competing solutions from Kaspersky, McAfee, Microsoft, Sophos and Trend Micro. Passmark conducted the same evaluation for Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition against comparable solutions from ESET, Kaspersky, McAfee and Trend Micro; again, Symantec received the top performance scores.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12: To provide unmatched protection against today’s sophisticated threat landscape, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 uses Insight, Symantec’s award-winning community and cloud-based reputation technology, to detect and block new threats earlier and more accurately than any other corporate security product. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 also leverages Insight to reduce the overhead of virus scanning by as much as 70 percent by automatically identifying and whitelisting Symantec-trusted high-reputation files, eliminating significant scanning activity from each endpoint. In addition, SONAR, the world’s first hybrid behavioral-reputation engine, monitors running applications for suspicious behaviors to block zero-day and highly targeted threats in real-time. Symantec’s intrusion prevention system (IPS) technology blocks attacks at the network layer, before they can do damage to a computer. Together, these technologies make Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 the fastest, most effective, corporate endpoint security product on the market.

Optimized for performance on virtual systems, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 can automatically identify and manage virtual machines (VMs). Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 also integrates directly with VMware’s security APIs to scan for malware inside offline VMware images. To alleviate concurrent scans, known as ‘AV Storms,’ from impacting performance in dense virtual environments, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 whitelists baseline VM images and shares scan results across VMs so that identical files only need to be scanned once across an entire pool. When combined with the scanning elimination from Insight, Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 enables faster, more responsive host systems, which in turn supports greater density of virtual instances, particularly for highly consolidated VDI environments.

Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition: Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition employs the same Insight, SONAR and IPS technologies to offer enterprise-class threat detection technologies and performance improvements for small business customers. With simple-to-use features such as an installation wizard, pre-configured policy settings and automated notifications and reports, Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition meets smaller organizations’ needs with the fastest, most effective anti-malware capabilities in the industry. Small businesses will have peace of mind that their data is safe from cybercriminals, so that they can stay focused on growing their businesses.

Security for Any Size: Symantec provides a broad portfolio of flexible solutions to meet the varying needs of companies of all sizes—from the largest enterprises to small businesses. For mid- to large-sized organizations, Symantec offers Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 for on-premise deployment. Symantec also offers the Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition which includes messaging security and Web security along with backup and recovery capabilities. For smaller organizations, Symantec offers both cloud-based and on-premise solutions with Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition, giving customers with flexible deployment options to best meet their business needs. Free trial versions are available:

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Trial

Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition Trial

Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud Trial

Switch to Symantec: Small and medium organizations currently using a competing endpoint security product may qualify for discounted pricing on Symantec Endpoint Protection 12. Symantec customers with a current maintenance contract are entitled to upgrade to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 at no additional cost. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition are now available for purchase through Symantec’s worldwide network of value-added authorized resellers, distributors and systems integrators or directly.

Symantec Security Framework: Symantec Endpoint Protection is part of the Symantec Security Framework, a portfolio of security products and services that enable organizations to counter emerging threats, support new computing models and simplify security management. Symantec’s portfolio of security products and services allow organizations to pursue innovations - such as mobile, cloud and virtual computing models. By providing relevant, actionable security intelligence and simultaneously simplifying security management, businesses can increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of their security posture.

Quotes:

“Organizations of all sizes are at risk of targeted cyber attacks which continue to increase in size, scope and sophistication. Pairing our award winning Insight technology with blazingly fast performance in Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 gives all our customers peace of mind that they are always secure and productive.” -- Chirantan “CJ” Desai, Senior Vice President, Endpoint & Mobility Group, Symantec "As a global corporate travel organization with more than 4,000 workstations and laptops and nearly 1,000 servers both virtualized and physical, securing our assets so that all of our information is protected is our most important goal in today's fast evolving threat landscape. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 provides a more robust, intelligent, scalable solution that also demonstrates improved performance in scan time and CPU utilization over the previous version. The updated console GUI allows us to access the information we need in a more accessible and logical manner.” -- Shawn Taylor, Manager of Systems Security, BCD Travel “Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 prevents trusted and known files from being constantly scanned and re-scanned, and that's especially important to us for our increasingly mobile workforce using laptop or tablet devices. The first scan on our test machines lasted about 90 minutes. Now, we're down to no more than 15 minutes. We have a large virtual server environment that is also benefiting from the trusted cache database that significantly improves performance for our end users and reduces the amount of time my team must devote to monitoring for threats. We look forward to implementing Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 across our server farm.” -- Bob Lerner, senior systems software programmer, Hennepin County (Minn.) government

“We installed Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 beta on both physical and virtual servers, and even though Symantec told us to expect much faster scan times, we were still surprised. Thanks to the new Insight and SONAR technologies, even running a full scan had little system impact. The new heuristics and reputation-based security features not only improve performance, but also significantly reduce worry about constantly updating virus definitions. We will continue testing the final release and if it performs just as well across a wider base, as we expect it will, we'll roll it out company-wide and integrate the new Symantec Protection Center management so we have one portal to manage all our security technologies.” - -Travis Anderson, IT security administrator, Meredith Corp. “We tested the two most recent releases of Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 beta in house and in several customer environments. We have watched the Insight technology work well with the Norton line of products for a while now, and we’re thrilled to see this innovative technology now be integrated into Symantec Endpoint Protection. The new version is impressive and will appeal to both new clients and those who are upgrading from their current Symantec protection. Businesses of all sizes can benefit from the level of protection that Symantec provides. We’re excited to start rolling this out across our client base.” --Ken Weinberger, Founder, Nexario Solutions, a service of Anchor Consulting

Related

Blog Post: Small Businesses: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Small Business Edition Is Now Available! Video: Virtualization Security with SEP 12.1 Security Competitive Challenge SlideShare: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Press Kit Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition Symantec Security Framework Internet Security Threat Report Wall Street Journal Innovation Awards Bio: Chirantan Desai Bio: Blake McConnell Bio: Jason Nadeau

Downloads

Trial: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Trial: Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition Trial: Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud “Switch and Save” Security Promotion Box Shot: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 Box Shot: Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition Dennis Labs Test in Virtual Environments Tolly Group Test in Virtual Environments AV Test: Real World Testing Report PassMark Software: Enterprise Endpoint Protection Performance Benchmarks PassMark Software: Small Business Endpoint Protection Performance Benchmarks

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The Security Technology and Response (STAR) organization, which includes Security Response, is a worldwide team of security engineers, threat analysts and researchers that provides the underlying functionality, content and support for all Symantec corporate and consumer security products. With Response centers located throughout the world, STAR monitors malicious code reports from more than 130 million systems across the Internet, receives data from 240,000 network sensors in more than 200 countries and tracks more than 25,000 vulnerabilities affecting more than 55,000 technologies from more than 8,000 vendors. The team uses this vast intelligence to develop and deliver the world’s most comprehensive security protection.

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