The recent visit of several industry analysts in the Green Park EBC created the perfect opportunity to provide insights into Symantec's Unified Information Management Strategy and the Information Fabric Platform that underpins this strategy.
Paul Dominjon, Symantec's Senior Product Marketing Manager, pointed out that customers are moving increasingly to a virtual environment, while many business-critical applications remain on physical servers. At the same time, our customers often have operations that have grown through mergers and acquisitions with up to two to three backup solutions in play and little or no integration. “The upshot of this is that customers are simply too busy to rationalize, consolidate and simplify their technology and licenses,” said Dominjon.
Whatever the customer infrastructure, Symantec's role is to support our customers and the wider business community through our redefined Unified Information Management Strategy, delivering a platform that integrates information management products such as NetBackup, Backup Exec, Enterprise Vault, eDiscovery and Storage Foundation. Meanwhile, customers using Symantec Data Loss Prevention and Data Insight can better manage unstructured data governance by combining data classification details with ownership, usage and access information. This will be the way forward for customers who need to accomplish more information management objectives with less complexity.
The analysts learned that with our Unified Information Management Strategy, Symantec will be positioned to deliver more benefits from a streamlined set of products that enable customers to make better decisions about their data. “Through the Information Fabric Platform, various information sources can be connected together to create a repository of metadata that enables Symantec to recommend to customers the solutions they need across the organization that will drive business agility and decision-making through its greater breadth and capability,” continued Dominjon.
A Symantec customer explained that designing, building and implementing solutions around storage for customers was all about standards and standardization, ultimately ensuring an efficient, quality service that is run by fewer people. Furthermore he talked about having full confidence in supporting customers through NetBackup, for example, leveraging the efficiencies it brings and driving in templated solutions.
In addition a Symantec partner said customers were putting much onus now on backup and recovery solutions and what they can deliver to the business. He argued that the backup solution is their insurance policy, if everything above it fails, and that Symantec backup represents best value to those customers.
Recent technology announcements were highlighted to the analysts with focus on new versions being customer satisfaction, delivering rock-solid technology, reducing administration cost, delivering broader platform support, while increasing performance and end user productivity.
- Disaster Recovery Orchestrator 6.1, leveraging Microsoft Azure Cloud capabilities to reduce cost of customers having a secondary disaster recovery facility
- Enterprise Vault 11, focused with support of more email platforms either on premise or in the Cloud
- Backup Exec 2014, with 100% performance improvement, latest OS and Hypervisor support, simplified licensing with Virtual or pay per TB flexibility
If you have any questions or would like to know more about Symantec’s Information Management strategy please contact me at Caroline_Dennington@symantec.com (Twitter: @CDennington).