Symantec: Education key to staying on top

More than 1,200 customers, partners and industry experts attended the event at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre in Darling Harbour.

The conference highlighted key trends and advances in security, storage, and systems management and provided insights into some of Symantec’s development projects.

Speaking about the change in virtualisation technologies, Enrique Salem, Symantec chief operating officer, said: “The first wave of virtualisation focused on specific platforms and hardware such as storage, servers, networks and desktops.

“As virtualisation becomes commoditised, the next wave of this technology will change the way software is delivered, managed and consumed at the endpoint, thereby improving user productivity while reducing IT complexity.”

Throwing the spotlight on the consumerisation of IT, Mark Bregman, chief technology officer for Symantec, said the trend of employees introducing their own consumer devices into the workplace, meant a change in how enterprises deliver their services to staff and their customers.

“Corporate IT managers have previously enjoyed almost total control over their environments. We are seeing this change as organisations are faced with an increasing requirement for the exchange of critical information regarding customers, partners, and employees,” said Bregman.

“The challenge for IT managers is to find ways to enable the use of a wide range of technologies in the workplace while ensuring the data residing in the network is secured and managed appropriately,” he added.

Bregman claimed a key part to managing this change is to put policies in place to educate employees and implement data loss prevention and encryption tools so that organisations can understand where their data is and how it is being used.