With the release of NetBackup 7.7 last month we introduced support for NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP (cDOT). While the cDOT environment provides a highly-available, scale-out storage platform, it can be tricky to backup using storage-level technologies such as NDMP or NetApp Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapVault. Since data can live on any of the storage nodes within a cDOT cluster, NetBackup needs to work with NetApp OnCommand to locate and access the data it wants to protect. The NetApp Plug-in for NetBackup is the key to making that happen. To help us support cDOT, NetApp has just released version 2.0 of the plug-in that will allow NetBackup to pinpoint where data is at any given moment in order to orchestrate snapshots or NDMP streams.

Replication Director allows NetBackup to orchestrate NetApp snapshot and replication operations. This is done using Storage Lifecycle Policies that point to storage units that have been configured to utilize NetApp storage capabilities. While previous releases supported 7-mode, with the release of NetBackup 7.7 Replication Director now extends and enhances these capabilities for customers who have moved to cDOT. The benefits of Replication Director include:

• Integration with NetApp Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapVault

• Orchestrate snapshot and replication activity with NetBackup policies

• Perform application-consistent snapshots to maximize data integrity

• Index the contents of snapshots for item-level restore (now including NDMP indexing)

• Reduce the burden on the NetApp storage admin

To learn more, make sure to join our upcoming webcast on August 20 where experts from NetApp and Veritas will show you how to protect your NetApp cDOT storage platform with NetBackup.

Standardizing on Veritas Resiliency Platform gives your business an upper hand in maintaining proactive business continuity. Veritas has been known to support heterogeneous environments and Resiliency Platform carries this legacy forward.  Heterogeneity in data centers is the call of the day. Your business has a mix of virtualized and physical workloads, different OS and myriad of storage arrays and standardizing on a single IT business continuity solution improves operating efficiencies in your IT environments and helps you make the right business decisions at run time.

In continuing to provide our customers with a simplified and atomic experience of managing and orchestrating resiliency we compare Resiliency Platform with  VMware vSphere Site Recovery Manager (SRM), which is one of the many point products in use in today’s data centers.

Here are some of the key points that we believe significantly differentiates Resiliency Platform over SRM:

1.  SRM is a recovery management tool; Resiliency Platform is a Resiliency & Orchestration platform with recovery as one of the key aspects.

VMware SRM:

SRM orchestrates recovery of vSphere based virtual environment. It brokers the underlying array or uses vSphere replication as a data mover and has the recovery functionality built on top of it.    

Resiliency Platform:

Resiliency Platform true to its name is a platform that delivers business resiliency by transforming IT Service Continuity in your organization. It provides a lot of flexibility in your data center ecosystem, by co-existing with solutions for virtualization, high availability, as well as data replication that you may be running today. Resiliency Platform can layer over all your existing solutions without requiring a rip and replace. With no architectural changes required, your CAPEX costs stay down. It is a single interface that provides visibility into IT health across global sites, resiliency reporting for compliance needs, automated workload orchestration to simplify management and Recovery Automation and Readiness.

2.  Resiliency Platform is built grounds up to support heterogeneity; SRM only works in vSphere environments.

VMware SRM:

VMware says that support for virtual environment is enough. SRM is a point solution for vSphere only. But your data centers aren’t made up of only vSphere environments.      

Resiliency Platform:

A lot of customers are still investing highly in physical data centers, even though they are heavily virtualizing. For example older applications that can’t be virtualized or take any downtime. A single solution for supporting DR Orchestration in physical and virtual environments is still required. Resiliency Platform not only supports Hyper-V and vSphere, but your physical servers as well.

3.  Resiliency Platform is Application Aware and Intelligent; SRM is only VM aware.

VMware SRM:

VMware says it ensures that the VM is alive, and that Application awareness is not necessary.

Resiliency Platform:

Application awareness is a necessity not an option. . Status of a VM does not give insight into application health inside the VM, which can be a crucial factor in determining whether or not your recovery ( in the case of a VM level failover) is successful or not. Resiliency Platform provides application aware recovery instead of just application consistency.

4.  SRM only recovers VMs; Resiliency Platform gives you the flexibility to managing your complex business services.

VMware SRM:

The granularity of VM recovery bars SRM of supporting those workloads where application level recovery is needed as part of a  complex multi-tier business service. Customers would have to either change the environment to retro fit into SRM or have to use other solutions. This increases complexity as multiple layers of management build up on an already complex environment. This also leads to increase costs of technology procurement and management.

Resiliency Platform:

Resiliency Platform gives you the flexibility of choosing the granularity of recovery you require. You can recover individual applications, VMs multi-tier applications, or an entire site based on your resiliency plan. Recovery in Resiliency Platform brings up entire business services and not just the infrastructure layers. It provides insights at business service level and helps orchestrate Physical & Virtual Tiers (including 1000s of VMs), ensures Start & Stop functionality, Tests & Recovers as part of the Resiliency Plan.

Resiliency Platform from Veritas is truly a unified solution for IT service continuity across physical, virtual, and cloud. It helps organisations address their ever changing IT landscape and ensures business agility so they can  grow and compete effectively. Resiliency Platform gives your organisation a simple, reliable, and effective IT service continuity strategy to ensure that your business is always up and running, delivering total satisfaction to your internal and external customers.

Try out Veritas Resiliency Platform for free for 60 days across your physical and VMware environments. Download the 60 day free trail here.

Today marks the next stage of Symantec and Veritas becoming individual companies controlling their own destinies. We have reached a definitive agreement to sell Veritas to a group of investors led by The Carlyle Group, together with GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and other expected co-investors, for $8 billion. When the transaction closes at the end of the year, both companies will have stronger foundations to accelerate the execution of their strategies and to better address the different competitive opportunities each business faces.

Since we announced our intention to separate Symantec into two focused, industry-leading technology companies last October, we've been working continuously to prepare both Symantec and Veritas for their future as two independent businesses. While the sale of Veritas to The Carlyle Group will result in a different ownership outcome than a public spin, we still have the same intent: creating two standalone businesses that will both win in their respective markets.

Each company will build on its unique strengths and assets. As the world's largest cybersecurity company, millions of people, businesses and governments already rely on Symantec to keep them safe online or stop attackers from stealing valuable information. As a trusted brand, Veritas will continue to provide next-generation information management solutions to serve the world's largest and most complex environments.

Through the separation process, we've already begun to see evidence that renewed focus will allow each company to realize its full potential. But we have only scratched the surface of what we can do. Both companies will expand their offerings and give their customers and partners the tools they need to achieve greater success, while growing their respective businesses.

I couldn't be more excited about the possibilities ahead.

As a group of hundreds of large, medium and small organizations, many in the legal community have been working together to accelerate the maturation of cybersecurity practices with a goal of leapfrogging expectations.

The major components of the effort leverage certification and alignment to international standards with a focus on security above and beyond compliance, as well as how firms are sharing threat intelligence and improvements in security practices.

Tune in to this exclusive presentation as Peter Kaomea, CIO of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and Chair of the International Legal Technology Association's LegalSEC, and John Evangelakos, a Partner of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP and the Chair of the firm’s Data Security Committee, discuss the “unified theory” of how these security standards and information exchange practices are evolving.

To register, click the link below!

https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/registrations/new?ci...

Many of the CISOs I talk to have one top-of-mind issue: How do they deal with the flood of security challenges they’re now facing?  Especially as attackers move ever faster, digital extortion accelerates and malware gets smarter. Add to that the all-time high in Zero Day threats and the fact that nearly every sector is under attack and it’s no wonder that they are asking where they can find the solutions that will keep their enterprises safe.

Source: 2015 Symantec Internet Security Threat Report Vol. 20

Those same CISOs have to deal with a number of trends that are fundamentally reshaping the IT landscape, including:

• Dramatic shift to mobile platforms and the proliferation of IoT
• Disappearing perimeter, making it decreasingly relevant
• Enterprise data and applications moving to the cloud
• Rapid rise of Security-as-a-Service
• Governments and regulators playing an ever larger role

As analysts, you are likely hearing much of the same as you engage with these business leaders on a daily basis. I am excited to apply my experience and tenure in the enterprise security industry to the new opportunities ahead of us that address burning needs with our customers.

At Symantec, our Enterprise Security strategy centers on four key pillars: Threat Protection, Information Protection and Cyber Security Services – all built on a Unified Security Analytics Platform.

• With the rapidly evolving threat landscape, our Threat Protection solutions will focus on expanding from traditional protection to rapid detection, response and remediation
• With more data moving to the cloud, and more users creating and consuming this data from their mobile devices, our Information Protection solutions will move beyond the on premise/PC-centric world to Cloud and Mobile. Our mission is to protect data and identities, regardless of where the data resides: on premise, in transit or in the cloud
• With an increasing demand to manage customers' security environments with Security-as-a-Service, our Cyber Security Services business is expanding from a traditional monitoring service to offer incident response, applied intelligence and security simulation services
• Finally, we will be anchoring all the above with a Unified Security Analytics Platform to convert the unparalleled amount of telemetry we generate and collect into much deeper actionable intelligence. We regard this as a vital step forward.

As you will see, the Symantec Enterprise Security strategy is both very broad and deep and yes, it’s very ambitious, but we believe it is also highly achievable. Why? Because it’s built on some enduring differentiators that truly set us apart.

First, we have a very strong presence across many critical control points, endpoint, gateways, the data center etc. Secondly, we have an unrivalled amount of telemetry that we can actually use to better predict the outcomes, where we mine and analyze this information effectively.

We also have a great set of security technologies and engines that go well beyond the traditional industry approaches. These include behavioral analytics, reputational and predictive analytics, and many other techniques that we use in order to be able to dynamically detect and protect customers wherever and whenever needed.

Please join Amit Jasuja and myself on 18th August for a one-hour fireside chatwhere we will go into detail on each of the areas mentioned above. Importantly, we will be able to share with you more about our roadmap and our go-to-market strategy. You will also have the opportunity to share your views and ask questions directly.

In these times of great change, I am truly excited about the opportunities that are ahead for Symantec and look forward to continue working with you, the industry analyst community.

Overview

New to Symantec DLP 14 we have the ability to do Network Discover Scans (Data at Rest) of content that is stored in Cloud Storage locations.  The first service this is available for is Box.com. This post will cover how to configure a Network Discover Scan for Cloud Storage once you have applied the Cloud Storage License.

Steps to create a Box.com Discover Scan

Once the license for Cloud Storage DLP is loaded into the system a new entry to create a Box.com Discover Target will be listed. Once the license for Cloud Storage DLP is loaded in the system a new entry to create a Box.com Discover Target will be listed./

• Just like any Discover Target configure the target with Name, Scan Type and Schedule under the "General Settings."
• We need to Authorize the Box.com scanning account which is new
  
  
  1. Click on the authorize button
  2. Provide the username and password for the Administrator of your Box.com environment and click Authorize
  3. The DLP system will be authorized for 60 days and after that time the system can be reauthorized
• Within the Box.com scan we can filter out which files within the Box environment can be scanned within the box.com environment and the filters tab allows us to control this

• Along with being able to scan a folder on box.com we have the ability to "tag" a file with a response rule and this needs to be enabled in the protect tab of things.
  1. A separate blog post will cover this

Once this is all done, a Cloud Storage Target for Box.com will be configured and setup.  THis target can then be run just like any network discover target.

Do I need a different license for this?

Yes, a license for "Cloud Storage DLP" according to the DLP Licensing Guide.  This is a subscription based license available in a 1-year subscription.  

This article aims to help correct the problem when a technical matter a new category in ServiceDesk and the file is formatted wrong.

When this occurs several categories of items are created and this flow is intended to eliminate several items to expedite the correction.

Problem:

Solution:

List of all categories. You must remove the items from lsita you want to keep . The items remaining on the list will be excluded.

Only what is on the list will be removed

After clicking the delete button the completion screen will be displayed.

Noting the ServiceDesk portal is possible to display the items were excluded

Workflow:

Below is the image worflow and is also available the workflow package for download

Regads,

André Florencio

Trucks move stuff. The engine burns fuel to generate power. Transmission system sends the power to the wheels. The trailer carrying the payload moves. Trucks consume a finite amount of time and energy to reach destination. We have learned in high school that engines and transmission systems have less than 100% efficiency. You are losing some of the generated power to heat and friction. Let us say you were given four of these big rig systems, all are identical with the exception of the transmission systems. Now you are measuring the time they take and fuel they burn to move a fixed amount of payload from one location to another. You repeat the experiments for different amounts of load. You plot the results to benchmark performance, efficiency and scale.  

Backup solutions integrating with VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) are similar to the transmission systems in trucks. The engine that really powers the backup process is the set of vStorage APIs. The goal of the backup solution is to harness its power to move data in virtual machines to secondary storage systems. Thus the virtual machines being backed up constitute the payload.

As some of you already know, Veritas/Symantec had asked Principled Technologies to benchmark these transmission systems in harnessing the power of VADP. Here are the results.  

Remember that all trucks are equipped with the same engine (VADP). The load added (from 100 VMs to 1000VMs) for various tests are also the same. In accordance with the strict benchmarking standards, all the trucks were given a few runs to break-in so that the regular day-to-day operating conditions are evaluated. After the break-in runs, three benchmarking runs are conducted for each load. The median value for each truck for each load is plotted above. Let us interpret the results. 

Performance

The first thing that stands out from figure 1 is that the orange truck (NetBackup is represented in Orange. As this benchmarking started before the announcement of Veritas separation we used orange to represent NetBackup) is the fastest no matter how small or large the payloads are. And red truck (Competitor ‘C’) is the slowest! Even at the largest payload of 1000 VMs, NetBackup is 5.8x times faster than the slowest in the herd. 

The blue (Competitor ‘E’) and green (Competitor ‘V’) are weak when compared with the performance leader, NetBackup. However both are way better than the red truck. The bottom-line: If you are on blue or green trucks and run out of gas, do not hop onto to red truck! It is more like hopping on to an inefficient and slow steam wagon! 

Efficiency

Now let us quickly gloss over figure 2. What you see is the CPU consumption at the data mover. In trucking terms, we are looking at how much gasoline is consumed for the trips and how much is still available in the reservoir if you had wanted to carry more loads. 

The orange truck (NetBackup) not only completed the trip much quicker but it also did the task with a lot of gasoline to spare. As you see can see we had to specifically draw attention to almost lost orange line in the resource utilization chart because of overwhelming gasoline consumption for pretty much all other trucks. The worst performer once again is the red truck. It is not just slow; it is also a gas-guzzler! There aren’t really any more resources to spare so you couldn’t have added more payload and hoped to finish the trip in the same time frame. The blue truck uses up nearly 85% of resources to for its trip. The green truck starts somewhat well but the consumption shoots up during the final quarter.  

Scalability

What exactly is scale in the context of this benchmark? The scalability is a measure of how well the product performs as the load it needs to handle increases. As you can see from figure 1, as you increase the load NetBackup continues to perform well ahead of the herd. But this data by itself only justifies that NetBackup is #1 in scale. Now let us move to figure 2. NetBackup data mover (media server) is using less than 50% of the gasoline while finishing the task in less than 1/5th of the time when compared to the worst performer. In other words, by the time the red truck moves 1000 VMs, NetBackup could have moved 10,000 VMs! That is 10x better scale! NetBackup is not only #1 in performance but it stays at that position while consuming the least resources thereby making more room for future demands. Thus NetBackup is indeed the king of scale. 

There is a lot more for us to share with you. How about scalability in recovery? How about storage integration? Will you be at VMworld San Francisco this year? Join George Winter and me at this session to learn more about the benchmark design, methodology, results and lessons learned. 

King of scale benchmark revealed in VMworld #STO5475

What are your plans to further enhance the NetBackup user interface?

Do you have any plans to accelerate backups to cloud storage?

What joint activities do you have planned with NetApp?

What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Tomorrow the Veritas NetBackup product team will be hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) event on Reddit. You’re all invited! We are bringing our big guns to this fight – a couple dozen experts from product management, engineering, and support representing at least a couple centuries of experience in enterprise backup and recovery. We’re not sure what everyone will ask about, so we’re making sure we have a good cross-section of talent and experience.

We haven’t done this before. Well we did one AMA focused on our backup appliance offering a few months ago, but technical problems derailed it. That being said, we expect things to go a lot more smoothly this time. I’m excited to do this because there aren’t a lot of forums where we can have open discussions with people about our favorite topic: Marvel superhero movies. We can also talk about enterprise backup and recovery if you want as well.

We may have heard some of your questions before, I bet we hear some we haven’t heard yet, and probably some interesting feedback from NetBackup users that will benefit others who are lurking in the cyber shadows. The event begins at 2pm EDT and ends just in time for a cold one. Join us, and don’t forget to bring your keyboard!

Join the NetBackup Reddit AMA….

#VtasPart: Veritas sale to the Carlyle Group announced http://bit.ly/1NxZ0uv& Veritas Technologies LLC goes social http://bit.ly/1HJcyi3

This week Symantec announced the sale of Veritas to the Carlyle Group http://bit.ly/1NxZ0uv and Veritas Technologies LLC goes social on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare & Instagram http://bit.ly/1HJcyi3

Twitter: http://bit.ly/1PoIr5a
LinkedIn:http://linkd.in/1KS8Rgw
YouTube: http://bit.ly/1frJHse 
SlideShare:http://bit.ly/1PoIApf
Instagram:http://bit.ly/1JWO8qI

Simply click share at the top of the page to share this blog post with your professional social networks or follow and share selected stories below.

Brand Story

YouTube Video: Veritas Solutions Put Your Information to Work for You
Twitter: Afraid of the delete button? Here’s a quick @veritastechco video on which #data can keep: http://symc.ly/1DLch2H#VtasPart
Linkedin: This is tough to hear… two-thirds of the information being kept is worthless. Anyone else find that surprising? @Veritas Technologies Corporation helps decipher the useful from the waste: http://symc.ly/1DLch2H

Backup & Recovery

Backup Landing Page
Twitter: How’s your #backup efficiency doing? Here are ways to lower costs and improve effectiveness from @veritastechco: http://symc.ly/1Tv4EPt#VtasPart
Linkedin: Data from every part of the organization…overwhelming! However, here’s a great resource from @Veritas Technologies LLC to help lower costs and improve data efficiency. Check it out:http://symc.ly/1Tv4EPt

YouTube: NetBackup 17x Faster Than CommVault
Twitter: Enjoy spending your time backing up data? Me neither. Check out how @veritastechco does more in less time: http://symc.ly/1DLcqmz#VtasPart
Linkedin: 1000 VMs in only 8 minutes? @Veritas Technologies Corporation says, “Challenge accepted.” http://symc.ly/1DLcqmz

Information Availability

Blog: Transforming IT Service Continuity with Veritas Resiliency Platform
Twitter: What are the top 3 things you need in your #IT continuity plan? Any guesses? http://symc.ly/1DLcrHh#VtasPart @veritastechco
Linkedin: Interested in your ideas…what are the top three benefits you’d like to have in your IT service continuity plan? Here are some ideas from @Vertias Technologies Corporation: http://symc.ly/1DLcrHh

Information Governance

InfoGov eBook
Twitter: Mounting data, higher costs, etc…all issues we’re facing. Here’s helpful info from @veritastechco: http://symc.ly/1Tv4WWF#VtasPart #bigdata
Linkedin: @Gartner projects that less than 1% of progressive companies have information governance strategies in place. Interesting statistic…where does your business fall? http://symc.ly/1Tv4WWF

VMworld

Twitter: Expert colleagues @AbdulRasheed127 and @vmxgeorge will be sharing #databackup best practices and more at #VMworld: http://symc.ly/1PnZwfq
Twitter: Heading to #VMworld? Make sure to stop by booth 713 and see the latest solutions from Veritas. See you there! http://symc.ly/1PnZwfq
LinkedIn: Heading to @VMworld? Excited to see my colleagues @Abdul Rasheed and @George Winter share their data backup expertise at the conference. Show them your support by registering for their sessions: http://symc.ly/1PnZwfq

Partners, we look forward to helping you innovate, experiment & accelerate in the Veritas Expert Community http://bit.ly/1HJcyi3

I run many different lab environments to support the work that I do both in the Symantec Connect community and for the company I work for. I see all different types and sizes of Enterprise Vault customer out there, and a question that sometimes come to mind is how can Enterprise Vault be deployed in small environments?

Say there are just a few hundred users. Up to 1000 even. What can you do?

Of course you can get a nice SQL server, and another server to host Enterprise Vault on. Plus a pile of storage for each server. In some organisations though space itself is tight, and the cost of managing multiple servers (in terms of time and resources) has to be weighed up against the elegant way to install things on different machines. I think for some people installing two servers (minimum) for Enterprise Vault is just not something that is 'easy' to swallow.

In these situations, maybe it's worth considering the lab environment-type configuration. An 'all in one' machine. If you get a well spec'ed machine with say 12 or 24 cores or more, and 48 Gb or 64 Gb of RAM (or more), surely that would be enough?  Yes, it probably is in many circumstances. Of course you would need to do due diligence in terms of making sure the disk layout was well thought out:

- Different disks for SQL DB's

- Different disks for SQL transaction logs

- Different disks for SQL Temp DB

- Different disks for EV installation files (perhaps)

- Different disks for Indices

- Different disks for Vault Store partition data

In the end, I don't see why, even though it's against most best practices, that a small deployment of Enterprise Vault like this wouldn't work. Have you deployed anything like this, or been involved in discussion about this? Let me know in the comments below...

Welcome to the July edition of the Symantec Intelligence report. Symantec Intelligence aims to provide the latest analysis of cyber security threats, trends, and insights concerning malware, spam, and other potentially harmful business risks.

Last month we reported how the spam rate had dropped below 50 percent of email traffic. Almost as if in response to this seemingly watershed moment, the spam rate went up slightly in July, just crossing the midpoint mark again with a percentage of 50.1. While this is the first time the spam rate have increased in more than a year, we still anticipate that the rate will continue its slow, downward trajectory in the months to come.

The Manufacturing and Wholesale industries both saw significant increases in targeted attack activity in July, where both industries were up eight percentage points from June. Enterprises with more than 2500 employees were the most commonly targeted organization size during the month. The number of vulnerabilities disclosed was up as well in July. There were 579 vulnerabilities reported, in comparison to 526 in June. Of particular note were six zero-day vulnerabilities discovered during the month—the highest number seen in more than a year. Four of these zero-day vulnerabilities—three for Adobe Flash Player and one for Microsoft Windows—were discovered in the data cache of the Italian covert surveillance and espionage software company, Hacking Team, which suffered a data breach in early July.

There were 53.7 million new pieces of malware discovered in July. While down slightly from June, this is still well above the 40.3 million average seen over the last twelve months. Ransomware has also declined slightly this month, though there have been modest increases in the amount of crypto-ransomware seen in July. There was also a slight decrease in malware detected in email traffic during the month, though the Agriculture, Forestry, & Fishing industry remained on top of the list of sectors most likely to receive malicious emails.

In contrast, four mobile malware families were released onto the mobile malware landscape in July, the highest number seen in one month during 2015. The number of mobile malware variants also continues to trend upwards, where 42 Android malware variants were seen per family during July.

We hope you enjoy the July Symantec Intelligence Report. You can download your copy here.