Do you know where your data is now?

'It's true that for many of us mobile devices make business life extremely convenient - but like most good things they also come with a risk.

As many IT professionals will tell you, that risk lies in the increasing amounts of valuable information being stored on PCs, laptops, and removable storage devices such as hard disks and memory sticks.

Businesses are rapidly recognising the need to safeguard data on their endpoints.

Loss or leakage of data from endpoints not only puts critical intellectual property, customer data, and other sensitive information at risk of falling into the wrong hands, but it can also subject businesses to substantial costs and embarrassing public disclosures.

Think about it: the typical business contains an increasing number of smartphones, peripherals, PDAs, laptops, and desktops.

Symantec estimates more than half of companies have lost data through lost or stolen laptops or USB drives. Then there are servers and gateways.

Enterprises have mostly responded to this in a scattered way, drawing on technologies from different vendors. But a scattered approach to enterprise security is problematic.

It's costly to implement, a pain to manage, and not as effective as it needs to be.

Some businesses have also moved their security to a cloud model, but even then such a model cannot protect your business when the data resides on the endpoint.

There's no doubt that adoption of cloud computing is increasing but Symantec believes there will never be a clean break with all established infrastructure and services moved suddenly to the cloud.

For the foreseeable future, there will be a combination of endpoint, server and cloud computing.

This means security strategy must embrace all aspects of your computing platforms.

Providing protection for your  endpoint is just as important as protecting your servers.

The changing threat landscape

The threat landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years.

It used to be that the majority of attacks were simply to make headline news. Not any more.

Today it's a profession and it's about money. Professional hackers continuously develop tactics to gain access to an organisation's systems and information.

One gauge of the growing sophistication of attacks is the appearance of blended threats, which integrate multiple attack methods such as worms, Trojan horses, and zero-day threats.

The economic downturn complicates matters, making businesses even more susceptible to attacks.

Angry ex-employees and hackers hungry for income are finding ever more creative ways to break into systems.

To combat the growing threats against their IT infrastructures, organisations have acquired and deployed a variety of security products from a variety of vendors.

But deploying these security products individually is not only time-consuming, it also increases IT complexity and costs.

Organisations then need to provide management, training, and support for a variety of different endpoint security solutions.

Also, differing technologies can often work against one another or impede system performance due to high resource consumption.

In many cases, the end result has been overlap, protection gaps, and increased licensing costs.

A comprehensive approach

As organisations worldwide face budget restrictions, they're looking for places to cut, and IT security teams aren't exempt from the pressure.

Everyone is being asked to do more with less. By implementing comprehensive endpoint security solutions, organisations can simplify the operation of their protection strategy while reducing costs with a single vendor.

There are several steps business can take. First they can educate employees, enforce company policies, encrypt data, and install a comprehensive endpoint security solution that protects against today's complex malware, data loss, and spam threats, and allows quick system and data recovery.

What to do

Managing and protecting every device in an enterprise isn't easy but partners can play a key role in acting as the trusted advisors to businesses by helping them identify security holes in their business and implementing best practice solutions.

Their role is to ensure customers remain diligent.

Some simple steps partners can take to help their customers include:

• Invest the time to properly understand the changing threat landscape so you can provide sound expert advice to your customers.
• Identify all customers who are running point security products or older versions and engage in talks around their security risks.
• Conduct security checks to help customers identify gaps in their security strategy and understand their security needs.
• Drive upgrade or migration projects to bring your customers up to date with the latest endpoint security solutions.

If an organisation's information technology team or its IT partners lack the visibility to protect the business's sensitive information - wherever it may be - that puts it at risk.

Such visibility is not possible with a patchwork of security point products. To ensure their critical information is secure and truly protected, businesses need a comprehensive protection strategy that includes endpoint security, messaging security, backup and recovery.