MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 6, 2012) - Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: [ SYMC ]) today announced it will deliver a new approach for modernizing backup and recovery, a process that has become unnecessarily complicated and expensive as organizations' data stores grow exponentially. Compared to traditional backup, Symantec's approach enables 100 times faster backup, eases management and simplifies recovery if a disaster occurs, helping customers realize significant cost savings while better protecting their business information. Over the last 20 years data has exploded, virtualization has become widely adopted and service level agreements (SLAs) have become near impossible to meet. These challenges also affect the smaller businesses that struggle with backup complexity and are at risk of data loss due to a disaster. The current approach to modernization introduces an ever-growing collection of point solutions resulting in added complexity, increased costs and headaches for backup administrators, network administrators and executives.

"The single most dramatic change is scale -- or volume -- of data, applications and virtual machines which cannot be processed by current backup environments. Organizations have increased service level agreements, raising expectations of availability and the need to run in a 24/7 business model. When combined with trying to integrate new technologies, it adds up to a disruptive environment with a huge impact on IT teams. Organizations small and large need a holistic protection strategy, a single platform or solution, to handle the variety of data types and workloads as opposed to integrating a number of disparate point solutions, which proves to be costly and time consuming," said Dave Russell, vice president of Storage Technologies and Strategies, Gartner.

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"Today, Symantec unveils a radical new plan to modernize data protection that will drive out 80 percent of the operating costs associated with backup over the next five years," said Deepak Mohan, senior vice president of Symantec's Information Management Group. "Symantec is announcing a new set of solutions that address the problems in backup -- from the most complex of enterprise data centers requiring a true tiered-recovery strategy to the smallest business that needs the confidence that they can easily recover their data."

Symantec recently surveyed more than 1,400 IT professionals worldwide on their backup practices and their ability to recover information in the event of a disaster. The findings reveal that traditional approaches to backup are broken and a new approach is vitally needed:

49 percent of respondents can't meet service level agreements (SLAs) due to too much data
72 percent of respondents would switch backup product if speed doubled
28 percent say they have too many backup tools
Organizations average four backup solutions to protect physical systems, and three for virtual
42 percent of respondents believe that their virtualization backup is not adequately or perfectly working
More than a third (36 percent) of respondents would not bet their paychecks that 100 percent of backed-up data could be recovered

According to Symantec's 2011 [ SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey ], SMBs are not making disaster preparedness a priority until they experience a disaster or data loss. Half of respondents do not have a plan in place and 41 percent said that it never occurred to them to put together a disaster recovery plan. The survey data reveals that the cost of not being prepared is high, putting an SMB at risk of going out of business.

Key components to Symantec's unique approach to data protection are the [ NetBackup 7.5 ] and [ Backup Exec 2012 ] software and cloud solutions, designed to help Symantec's more than two million backup customers address backup issues common to companies all over the world. Symantec's strategy focuses on the following areas:

Change the Operating Model of Backup: Symantec's strategy is to eliminate 80 percent of the operating cost of backup by delivering an integrated platform that replaces multiple solutions typically used in backup today. Symantec backup appliances can drive down costs even more than traditional appliances by combining backup software and deduplication into a single solution supported by a one vendor, that is fast to deploy and easy to manage. The ability to combine software, appliance and cloud-based backup solutions provides customers greater choice and flexibility.
Break the Backup Window: 100 times faster backup with NetBackup 7.5, compared to traditional approaches, means organizations can complete full backups at the speed of incremental backups without sacrificing recoverability to meet critical service levels.
Fight Infinite Retention: Too many organizations keep backups for too long. Knowing when information can be deleted can significantly reduce costs and management burdens on IT. New backup search capabilities in NetBackup give IT the ability to separate out what is relevant to legal or compliance investigations while keeping the rest of the backup infrastructure running on a more typical 30-60-90 day backup cycle. Infinite retention is infinite waste for IT and infinite risk for legal.
Unify Snapshots and Backup: A snapshot without NetBackup is just a snapshot. A snapshot with NetBackup is data protection, manageability and recoverability. Unifying snapshots and backup with NetBackup gives organizations the speed of snapshots with the recoverability of backup.
Stop Putting Tapes on Trucks: With the help of Symantec NetBackup technology, organizations can modernize their disaster recovery strategies and stop the practice of shipping tapes by truck. Symantec NetBackup Auto Image Replication (AIR) allows customers to eliminate volumes of physical assets and prioritize files that can be sent over the network, while significantly reducing the chance for human error.
Unite Virtual and Physical Backups: Reduce operating costs around virtualization with patent pending Symantec V-Ray technology that enables organizations to have deeper visibility into their VMware and Hyper-V machines for virtual backups with a single product. Integrated in NetBackup and Backup Exec, V-Ray delivers load balanced virtual machine backups to eliminate backup storms, improve virtual machine performance and reduce storage by deduplicating data everywhere, whether it is on VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers resulting in up to 90 percent storage reduction.
One Product for Any Recovery: Symantec provides one solution for all backups whether they are based on tape, disk, or in physical or virtual environments. Customers can recover any application or system to a virtual machine whether they have the hardware or not. Physical to virtual recovery is now included for free in Backup Exec, simplifying disaster recovery by automatically creating a virtual machine when recovery is needed. New backup to virtual (B2V) technology is also available to accelerate the migration from physical to virtual servers as part of the backup process.
Eliminate Complexity: Backup Exec has eliminated backup management complexity by simplifying the user interface, utilizing insights from millions of users, policies and licensing. This allows IT administrators and SMB owners to have a professional data protection strategy without being backup professionals.
Easy Backup: Symantec introduces Backup Exec Small Business Edition ensuring smaller companies can set-up proper data protection in less than 10 minutes and in three simple steps. In addition Symantec expands Backup Exec.cloud into Europe providing those customers who prefer a simple, automated and hosted backup offering a reliable, secure solution.

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About Storage from Symantec
Symantec helps organizations secure and manage their information-driven world both on-premise and in the cloud with storage management, archiving and eDiscovery, backup and recovery solutions.

About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage and systems management solutions to help consumers and organizations secure and manage their information-driven world. Our software and services protect against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently, enabling confidence wherever information is used or stored. More information is available at [ www.symantec.com ] or by connecting with Symantec at: [ go.symantec.com/socialmedia ].

NOTE TO EDITORS: If you would like additional information on Symantec Corporation and its products, please visit the Symantec News Room at [ http://www.symantec.com/news ]. All prices noted are in U.S. dollars and are valid only in the United States.

Symantec and the Symantec Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: Any forward-looking indication of plans for products is preliminary and all future release dates are tentative and are subject to change. Any future release of the product or planned modifications to product capability, functionality, or feature are subject to ongoing evaluation by Symantec, and may or may not be implemented and should not be considered firm commitments by Symantec and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.

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Symantec Declares Better Backup for All Sized Organizations and Calls for 80 Percent Reduction in Operating Costs

Symantec Declares Better Backup for All Sized Organizations and Calls for 80 Percent Reduction in Operating Costs