Symantec Vision day one round-up: lots of news but short on detail

I wasn't alone in feeling a little perplexed after the first day at Vision. Of the major announcements at the event, discounting the obligatory lumpen research-based press release story, there were three items worth covering: a new cloud security platform called O3; a data loss prevention (DLP) product for the iPad; and a refresh of the Veritas line focused on enabling private cloud building.

However, only one of these, the Veritas announcement, was addressed in any detail. Keynote speakers blustered through their presentations with only the merest of mentions for the iPad product and O3, while the accompanying press releases were similarly short on detail.

What we do know so far is that O3 is being marketed as a "layer above the cloud, protecting the cloud", according to Symantec's products and services president, Francis de Souza.

O3 will allow IT departments to secure access to cloud services from any device, and deprovision when a worker leaves the organisation. It will also provide encryption capabilities to protect any information in the cloud, and apply DLP technology to control what is sent to the cloud.

To be honest, if Symantec has rushed out these announcements in time for the show without actually having finished the products, it's probably the fault of us news-hungry hacks. If they'd delayed until next year it probably would have been old news, and what would we be writing about now?

Well, the major themes I'm picking up from the show this year are that Symantec, lumbering security giant that it is, has set its sights well and truly on the cloud, virtual and mobile spaces. So competitors beware. And it's not afraid to splash the cash to gain traction in these burgeoning areas of information security. It could be an interesting year ahead.

Another much hyped theme revolved around the idea that IT teams should be able to build private cloud infrastructures using their current server and storage kit, although, of course, with a vital sprinkling of the latest update to the Veritas portfolio.

The rest of the show was a long product pitch to an audience of, presumably, IT security practitioners, hyping the benefits of various Symantec tools from its flagship Endpoint Protection 12 product (complete with a 'state-of-the-art' application reputation system) to the V-Ray tool which provides visibility into virtual and physical environments.

One more thing that did interest me in its brief outing on stage during the opening keynote was the Symantec Protection Centre.

Demonstrated by EMEA senior vice president John Brigden on an iPad 2, this console-based technology has been designed to show executives a scorecard/dashboard type view of external threats across the globe in the context of their own security policies.

I could see this being a genuinely useful tool for execs looking to stay on top of an ever changing threat landscape with a high-level view on how it could affect their organisation.