Symantec launches Endpoint Protection 12

By Cassandra Mascarenhas
Global leader in providing security, Symantec Corp announced the availability of Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 (SEP 12) in Sri Lanka earlier this week, its latest antivirus and personal firewall product which can now be used by large, medium and small organisations.

The results from independent tests were also revealed at the launch, which demonstrated that the product outperforms the competition in both virtual and physical environments, providing unrivalled protection and blazingly fast performance.
“This product was launched in India over a period of three to four weeks and the feedback so far has been phenomenal – SEP 12 is a game changer that takes security into a completely different orbit. Symantec requires a lot of innovation to compete with people with malicious intentions as well and the advancement of technology,” explained Symantec Regional Director, South India and Sri Lanka Prasanth G.J.
Keeping to this culture of innovation, Symantec currently boasts over 1,000 global patents and the Symantec footprint on over a billion systems.
In the last year alone, the database of known viruses handled by Symantec witnessed an increase of eight million new viruses, an increase of 200% from the four million viruses accumulated over two decades. 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 organisations of all sizes today.
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.
“SEP 12 provides blazing performance with enhanced scanning, additional protection from web and email based threats and behavioural protection. One of the key trends in the market in Sri Lanka is virtualisation and the country is in a unique position to adapt to it. The challenge of securing a virtualised platform is very different and this software addresses this area as well as the areas of laptops and desktops and mobile security,” said Symantec Regional Manager of Systems Engineering K. Mathan Babu.
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 per cent by automatically identifying and white listing Symantec-trusted high-reputation files, eliminating significant scanning activity from each endpoint.
In addition, SONAR, the world’s first hybrid behavioural-reputation engine, monitors running applications for suspicious behaviours 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.  
Symantec provides security, storage and systems management solutions to help customers and organisations secure and manage information and their identities. The company which reported six billion dollars of revenue in 2010, of which 50% was from outside the United States, is now focusing on identity management and with the acquisition of VeriSign Authentication Services six months back has firmly positioned itself in this space.