I attended the 2010 Next@Norton this past week at the Symantec World Headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Reprising the 2009 event which was held at the Norton unit location in Culver City, also in California, this event was also filled with executives who proceeded to inform us, without the cover of a restrictive embargo, of the series of Norton products coming down the pike for the 2011 era.
This is a summary of the event.
Our full review will be published in the June 2010 issue of The Interlocutor, and then syndicated here.
The 2011-series of Norton Protection
In our first session, we explored the Norton 2011 series of products.
The Norton folks delved in-depth into the vision of Norton Anti-Virus, Norton Internet Security, and Norton 360. The emphasis here, was antivirus/anti-malware scanning, and rightfully so. One of the pain points suffered by endusers during the heydays of the feature-adding arms race by Internet security companies was a series of bloated, resource-hogging security suites. Systems performance was totally subjugated to the whims of the software vendors tripping over themselves to add the latest fad to their suite. Thankfully, Norton came out of that stupor, starting with the Norton NIS2009 product and continuing with the 2010-series products.
Well, for 2011, the trend of removing stuff that is not required for scanning performance continues. Moreover, Norton has stepped up the use of reputations in addition to heuristics in order to improve detection, quarantine, and eradication.
What is a virus signature, and how is it created at Symantec’s Norton Unit?
One of the advantages of being the ‘big dog’ in the antivirus/anti-malware space and having a very substantial number of your users engaged, is the ability to get a great number of viruses reported to you for identification and inoculation.
We were walked through the process whereby Norton identifies malware and develops ‘signatures’ the help Norton’s researchers identify those threats and subsequently create the solutions that are ultimately pushed out to endusers in order to help remediate the safety of their systems. Fascinating.
Data here and everywhere
An upside of the point above is that a great amount of data is collected. However, that data, coming from several million users can create its own problems, for a deluge of data is never a good thing.
Norton, based on the length of time they have done this we are told, has been able to develop algorithms whereby a meaningful result is obtained with the use of just a statistically-useful sampling.
the continued popularity of Norton products is a testament to the value of this data, for they have continued to remain the most popular AV package even in this age of almost immediate threats
Expanding beyond computers
Norton is seeking to parlay its dominance in PC system protection to connected devices, one of the fastest growing segments in virtually everything.
To achieve that, they have targeted cellphones initially, and all connected devices subsequently, as the next market to conquer.
To this end they have started developing software for phones – Android first, and have partnered with Mocana, which has just about the most impressive portfolio of design wins I have seen in a long while.
While I am not satisfied since, as you guessed, there isn’t a Windows Mobile app yet, I am nonetheless satisfied that they are pointed in the right direction.
