Symantec Helps Businesses Prevent Data Loss in Evolving IT Environments

New products will help combat online safety in new technology

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Symantec Corp. announced an updated version of Symantec Data Loss Prevention designed to help businesses prevent data leaks in their IT environments. Symantec Data Loss Prevention 10.5, the latest version of Symantec's data security suite, enables the use of social media while guarding against data loss, protecting information in private clouds, and helping organizations take ownership of unstructured data, such as documents, spreadsheets, and e-mail.

Social media is being increasingly used in business for collaboration and communication. Yet in Symantec's 2010 State of Enterprise Security study, Symantec learned that 84 percent of CIOs and CISOs considered social networking sites to be a serious threat to their security.

To enable the use of social media while addressing this threat, Symantec Data Loss Prevention has enhanced compatibility with Web 2.0 sites -- such as Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Meebo -- to stop the flow of sensitive data. Symantec Data Loss Prevention also minimizes IT support costs by providing a more transparent Web experience for end-users that seamlessly prevents data exposure without confusing the user with broken links or error messages.

Secure Private Clouds

Companies are increasingly turning to private clouds to help them cut server and storage costs. However, security is a chief concern with clouds, even when they live inside the corporate firewall. For example, organizations need to prevent sensitive information from being inappropriately transferred to unmanaged laptops and desktops, which could happen with remote employees or outsourced employees who need access to confidential data. To combat this, Symantec added new endpoint event coverage for workstations running virtualized applications and desktops, including Citrix XenApp and Citrix XenDesktop.

Take Ownership of Unstructured Data

Businesses are also drowning in unstructured data -- such as documents, spreadsheets, and e-mails -- which continues to grow exponentially every year. The key challenge for organizations is determining what information is stored in unstructured files and who is responsible for the data. To help companies solve this, Symantec recently introduced Symantec Data Insight that is now integrated into Symantec Data Loss Prevention. With Data Insight, organizations can discover where their most critical information lives, monitor its usage, and protect it by automatically inferring data ownership to speed up the incident remediation and data clean-up process.

Expanded Interest in Data Loss Prevention

Interest in data loss prevention is high with 89 percent of organizations at least considering a DLP solution, according to Symantec's 2010 State of Enterprise Security study. New buying centers are emerging in organizations that do not have complex data security requirements and are interested in preventing the loss of specific information, such as customer data, through common endpoint gaps, such as e-mail, Web, and USB. To support these new buyers, Symantec now offers Symantec Data Loss Prevention Standard Edition, which provides data loss prevention technology to protect against specific endpoint data loss.

Availability

Symantec Data Loss Prevention 10.5, with new support for Windows 7 64-bit, Symantec Data Loss Prevention Data Insight, and Symantec Data Loss Prevention Standard Edition are now available.

For more information, visit www.symantec.com.

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