Gartner Inc. has once again positioned Symantec as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) – a position Symantec has held for a 12-year span.¹ We believe this leadership position in the 2014 Magic Quadrant report, published January 8th, 2014, and Symantec’s recent positive vendor rating by Gartner² are indications of a strong product offering that performs well in detection, protection and performance.
According to the new Magic Quadrant report, which positions vendors based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision, “protection from common malware, as well as more advanced persistent threats, is the top critical consideration for EPP buyers.” The report further states that the rise of targeted attacks is “shredding what is left of the anti-malware markets stubborn insistence in reactive protection techniques,” and highlights the need for EPP solutions to be “more proactive and focus on the entire security lifecycle” to be successful in the future. We couldn’t agree more!
At Symantec, we believe organizations need to adopt a defense-in-depth strategy for effective endpoint protection. As such, Symantec Endpoint Protection leverages Insight (reputation-based security) and SONAR (behavioral-based security), Network Threat Protection, Device and Application Control, along with traditional antivirus technologies to deliver powerful layers of protection to our customers to catch threats the traditional security solutions miss.
Symantec Insight provides context based on age, association and the prevalance of a file to create a reputation score– giving organizations the ability to easily block files based on risk tolerance and reputation. SONAR is the main engine of Symantec’s behavior-based protection technology, analyzing application behaviors to determine what an application actually does (versus what it looks like) to provide effective, non-invasive protection from previously unseen zero-day threats. Network Threat Protection analyzes incoming data streams that arrive onto a user’s machine via network connections and blocks threats before they hit the system. In the last year, over 51 percent of the overall threats stopped by Symantec were stopped by these three, proactive, non-signature based technologies.
Servers represent a special endpoint type with specific needs. Symantec addresses these as well with Symantec Critical System Protection which employs a combination of host-based intrusion detection (HIDS), intrusion prevention (HIPS), and least privilege access control, to help organizations proactively safeguard heterogeneous server environments and the information they contain. Both Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Critical System Protection are ideal for securing both physical and virtual environments.
While Symantec Endpoint Protection was one of our products evaluated by Gartner for the 2014 Magic Quadrant report, we see our leadership position as reflective of our broad portfolio and management capabilities and performance against malware, including Data Loss Prevention, Drive Encryption, Endpoint Management and Mobile Management Suite.
We encourage our customers, prospects and partners to review the latest research from Gartner and learn more about the best ways they can protect their environments and information from attacks. Please go here to gain access to the full report.
Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
¹ Ten reports published since 2002; previous titles include the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Antivirus
² Vendor Rating: Symantec, November 21, 2013, G00255306