Symantec opens new Security Operations Centre

Celebrating 25 years in Australia, Symantec has opened its new office and Security Operations Centre in Sydney. The $12M project has centralised all of Symantec's Sydney operations with 375 of the their 500 Australian staff now in a new office facility.

The operations centre doubles Symantec's previous capability in almost every dimension including space, personnel and processing capacity. Symantec plans to add another 20 staff to its Operations Centre in the near term as existing services are expanded and new services are activated in the region.

Among the anticipated new services are advanced capabilities to carry out security simulations and improved threat protection. Vice President of Product Management in Symantec's Cyber Security Group, Samir Kapuria, noted that we are now in the era of "mega breaches" - where breaches result in the lost of tens of millions of data records - and that we the security industry needed to increase its capacity to deal with such threats.

Paul Fletcher, the Federal member for the NSW seat of Bradfield and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications, officially opened the new Security Operations Centre saying "IT security is both a private good and a public good" as it's rational for both companies and individuals to be wise when it comes to security.

Symantec's Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan Adrian Jones noted that one of the advantages of setting up a regional Security Operations Centre in Australia is the availability of staff from diverse cultural backgrounds - an important asset when dealing with customers across the globe. This was later echoed by Fletcher who said Australia has the "economic advantage of being a multi-cultural society".

According to Kapuria, the new Security Operations Centre will enable Symantec to better react to the threats of the future through what he called "big analytics" that allow organisations to pre-emptively deal with threats.

Anthony Caruana attended the opening of the Symantec Security Operations Centre as a guest of Symantec.

This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.