How important is India to Symantec? What kind of activity happens at your development center?

Symantec started its product operations with Veritas (which is now a Symantec company). Veritas set up an R&D center in Pune in 1994. We have a strong R&D presence in Pune thanks to three company acquisitions—Veritas, BindView and IMlogic. We call these the ‘Centers of Innovation’ and we have the largest one (a hub) in Pune and another smaller one in Chennai, with 2,700 employees. So, about a third of our global R&D (32 percent) is in India. We have another R&D hub in Silicon Valley.

The core development for many products is done here. On the storage side, there are some core features that were conceptualized and developed in Pune. We are proud that India contributes a high percentage of our patents and to our IP. Every product team in the US has a footprint in India — collaborating with teams here. Some of our product initiatives and strategies (for instance, our cloud or virtualization strategy) are driven from India.

Can you tell us about the latest security threats and how these have changed over the years?

The nature of today’s attacks are completely different compared to what we saw in the last decade. These are very targeted attacks, not generic. Today’s attackers will research who they are attacking. Government institutions and corporates are the new targets. The motives are financial. We also see
specialization. There are organized chains offering services. And these are getting harder to detect. The average malware morphs after every five attacks on an average.

What security innovation do you offer to guard against these new threats?

We believe in an integrated security approach. It can’t be just endpoint security. Firstly, you need to have an early warning system by way of a Global Intelligence Network (a global network that combines all our security expertise into one worldwide organization). We offer Remediation technology—i.e. if
you are attacked then how quickly can your system be restored to normal. Intelligent Protection is a solution to check morphing malware and changing signatures. For this, we offer reputation-based malware detection technology.

We have 200 million endpoints and our software can poll these on various parameters. Based on this collective information they can arrive at a certain score for a file that they see for the first time. It also generates less false positives.
Then we have counter-measures—techniques to discourage attacks and dissuade attackers.

What is Symantec’s cloud strategy and how are you taking this forward in India?

While everyone says the cloud is more relevant to SMBs, our research shows that the biggest cloud adopters today are large enterprises. We have a three-pronged cloud strategy for the enterprise. Firstly, we want to ensure that our products work both on premise and also in highly virtualized environments (the cloud). For instance, in the latest releases of our DLP and endpoint products, we added the ability to scan in the cloud environment.

Secondly, we want to provide hosted cloud services. So, our security software will be provided as a service. We acquired a company called Message Labs to take this forward. Through Message Labs we offer various security services as well as backup services.

Thirdly, we want to help people build clouds. We have a relation with Amazon for endpoint security. We also want to provide cloud-based storage. To date we have 52 Petabytes of consumer data on the cloud.