Symantec sees mobile and social as crucial to security fight

BARCELONA: The increasing use of mobile devices and social networks for collaboration are the two biggest challenges for IT security, according to Enrique Salem, chief executive of Symantec.

Speaking at its Vision 2010 conference in Barcelona on Tuesday, Salem told delegates that Symantec expects to see more smartphones connected to the internet than PCs next year, and that threats and the scope of attacks will evolve rapidly.

Currently 1.4 billion smartphones are connected to the internet and Symantec predicts this will to rise to 10 billion by 2014.

Despite the expected increase in the use of mobile devices, the hardware is ultimately not that important, according to Salem.

“Today you may have one device and tomorrow you could have another,” he said.

“While we will see an explosive growth in tablets from many vendors, so the device is not what matters. What matters ultimately is the people, [and] what they are trying to access.”

Symantec’s plan is to help store data centrally so information can be recovered on other devices after a simple verification process.

The firm also stated that as communication increasingly moves from email to social interaction, this could pose new security threats.

“We believe social enterprise will be the way that we collaborate going forward, that means we will be much more efficient. Information will be delivered to you and you will be collaborating with it," Salem said.

“Groups of people will be collaborating and this will cause dramatic improvements in productivity but will also introduce some new [security] risks.”