For the last year and a half at Symantec I’ve been working on what we call Information Risk Management. At its most basic level it’s four key pillars:
- Keeping the bad stuff out
- Keeping the good stuff
- Keeping stuff as required
- Finding stuff easily when needed
I love the using the word “stuff” when I’m talking to people, it always surprises them! However, it nicely sums up the fact that data or information is largely unstructured and unclassified these days and not immediately identifiable based on what system its in.
My focus has been largely the first two pillars in the context of messaging security. For Symantec that means the Brightmail family of technologies. My team mate Jaap has focused on the second two which fall under our Enterprise Vault related products.
However as you can see from the title of this post I’ve had a slight change of direction in the last few months and been pushed towards a stack of solutions in our security products that include the infamous Symantec Endpoint Protection (a.k.a. SEP). SEP is our desktop and server anti-virus product that is what most of the world probably associate with Symantec and it’s yellow boxes. If you use the twitter search site and search for the keyword “symantec” you’ll get an insight into what a vocal group think of that product. You’ll soon understand why I called it a “nettle”!
The reason I’m now working with it is my main focus, Brightmail, is now included in a bundle called Symantec Multi-tier Protection (SMP, must have acronym for everything in technology). SMP contains amongst other things, SEP for the endpoint, SMS for Exchange/Domino (anti-virus for the mail stores) and Brightmail. It’s designed to give complete coverage for end-to-end protection.
SEP has gained a bad reputation because we essentially rushed it to market and didn’t do adequate testing on all ranges of customer sizes. As a result we killed some of our smaller customers servers (who generally don’t have high-end dedicated machine per application). My challenge is that a bad reputation is quick to gain and doubly hard to shrug off. It also doesn’t help when idiots from PR companies try and replicate “comcastcares” on twitter and offer to help “fix peoples problems”. Just makes us look like we don’t have a clue.
The reason smart people though will realise from my title that “grabbing” a nettle is actually not a bad plan. Brushing up against a nettle will result in a painful rash, but grabbing it quickly results in no pain. Now you see my task: dive in, get knowledgeable as to what our customers want, speak honestly and make it work.