Symantec Announces Endpoint Protection 12 Beta, Protection Center 2.0

Earlier today at the Symantec Vision conference in Las Vegas, Symantec announced the public beta program for Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 (SEP12) and the upcoming release of Symantec Protection Center 2.0 (SPC2). According to Symantec, SEP12 takes advantage of Insight, Symantec's reputation technology that leverages community and the cloud to identify and protect against security threats. According to a Symantec news release, SPC2 will "offer a centralized view across the Symantec security portfolio and third-party products through three levels of integration - single sign-on, data collection and process automation."

In a phone interview last week, Symantec Product Marketing Manager Katie Burton stressed the significance of SPC2 integrating products and information from third-party vendors into the SPC2 management console. "[Integrating third-parties into SPC2] has been a fundamental shift for Symantec," Burton said. "We love customers using all of our products, but we realize that many use security products from other vendors." Burton says that integration will help SPC2 be a more effective management solution for many of their customers.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12

Symantec is also touting the improved virtualization security credentials of SEP12, with Burton adding that the product has been optimized to run quickly and with improved effectiveness in virtual environments. In a Symantec statement released this morning, Francis deSouza, Symantec's Senior Vice President of the Enterprise Security Group touted SEP12's virtualization features as well.

With the right protection, virtual environments can be as secure, or even more secure, than traditional infrastructure as a result of increased standardization, visibility, automation and control available in high-density environments," deSouza said. "Symantec Endpoint Protection defends against all types of attacks and is optimized for performance on VMware View and VMware vSphere."

Symantec Protection Center 2.0

The beta version of SEP12 is available now, and is offered in a two product variants: Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 for companies with more than 100 users, and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition 12 for companies with less than 100 users. SPC2 will be available free of charge to existing Symantec customers in Q3/Q4 2011.

Are you currently using Symantec Endpoint Protection? Would you consider upgrading to SEP12, or do you rely on other endpoint protection products? Let me know what you think by adding a comment to this blog post or by starting up a conversation on Twitter.

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