Every day we’re bombarded with news about the latest data breach. Unfortunately, the headlines we all read confirm findings in Symantec’s recent Internet Security Threat Report: the threat from hackers is not only growing, but also evolving. Today’s cyber security landscape requires more than antivirus; advanced malware protection requires up-to-date technology with the ability to stop unknown threats.
In fact, Symantec’s research showed that 51% of threats blocked by Symantec Endpoint Protection were stopped by technologies other than antivirus in 2012. Clearly, AV alone is not enough, and neither is outdated protection, says Piero DePaoli, senior director, product marketing, Symantec Corporation.
For customers to truly leverage their full security investment, it’s imperative that they upgrade to the latest, most robust product version for the most powerful protection. In the case of Symantec Endpoint Protection, customers who upgrade to the current version, SEP 12.1, gain protection against today’s complex threats, and improved IT efficiency and effectiveness.
It’s not just protection from evolving security threats to consider – it’s what makes overall good business sense. The free upgrade from SEP 11 to SEP 12.1 reduces total cost of ownership, extends the life of hardware, reduces incidents and empowers IT to focus on system architecture and integral parts of the business.
Organisations that don’t leverage their full security investment and deploy the most advanced protection available are more likely to combat significant malware incidents, risk a data breach and experience less satisfaction with system performance.
LoyaltyOne, a provider of global customer loyalty programs, upgraded to SEP 12.1 and cut scanning overhead by 70% on its 1 800 endpoints, while streamlining administration and audit preparation.
According to Geoff Hull, senior manager of IT at LoyaltyOne, “Moving from version 11 to version 12 has greatly improved the performance of our endpoints. We can assess about a 70% reduction in clients’ overhead on our machine while it’s doing scanning and our ability to manage those endpoints has also greatly improved making it a one-person job for the desktop engineering team.”
Third-party tests confirm that SEP 12.1 provides the fastest, most effective protection available for both physical and virtual machines. Symantec customers, on current maintenance, are entitled to all of the protection technology of SEP 12.1 at no additional cost. The path to upgrade follows the familiar process of a standard maintenance release and does not require infrastructure or policy updates.
The immediate reduction in help desk calls and the time spent in repair and remediation has significantly decreased the demand on IT security resources and allowed administers to focus on strategic initiatives such as patch management, deploying policy-based protection, implementing application and device control and addressing challenges like BYOD and mobility.
To protect its PCs, laptops, and servers from malware and spam e-mail, Baldwin Park Unified School District relies on endpoint and messaging security solutions from Symantec and Zones, a Symantec Platinum Partner.
The district is now maintaining 99,9% network uptime. Managing security for 4 100 endpoints takes less than 10 hours per week. Improved scan performance is allowing the district to defer US$1.3 million in hardware refresh costs. For Baldwin Park Unified School District, the upgrade process was seamless and made good business sense.
“We don’t want our technicians having to spend 20 minutes in front of every computer doing software upgrades that should be done remotely. By providing a seamless migration process that can be initiated from a centralised console, Symantec saved us months of deployment time.
“In three days, we were able to accomplish what might have taken us an entire school year with manual processes,” says Ozzy Cortez, Network Technician at Baldwin Park Unified School District.
SEP 11 has already entered end-of-life but Symantec is extending content updates through 2014 at no additional charge giving customers plenty of time to perform the upgrade. Migration is as easy as the SEP 11 maintenance updates that customers have been applying for years.
SEP 12.1 offers SEP 11 customers a free upgrade to the strongest protection and best performance in a single solution for both physical and virtual environments, allowing organizations to get more out of their security investment and focus on other business priorities.
