Symantec Announces CA Manager

PRESS RELEASE

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Sep 12, 2011) - Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center, a cloud-based service for enterprises with large numbers of certificates used for business authentication and data encryption on servers. Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center discovers, centralizes, and provides in-depth insight through advanced reporting which enables organizations to proactively manage certificates from any Certificate Authority (CA). For the first time, enterprises have total visibility and control over their certificates, enabling them to reduce risk, costs and operational inefficiencies.

Managing Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates is critically important for enterprises and is becoming a larger challenge, especially due to the skyrocketing number of mobile and cloud-based applications and devices worldwide which are driving growing infrastructure needs. SSL Certificates enable the verification of business identity as extended to a server, and encrypt sensitive data traversing between a web application and a web browser among other extended applications.

Unfortunately, until now getting comprehensive information on all SSL certificates, regardless of CA, across complex enterprise networks has been expensive, time consuming and resource-intensive. SSL Certificates deployed on both internal and external customer-facing applications pose a management challenge and an expiration risk, so in both cases certificate expiration surprises or installation misconfiguration can cause substantial embarrassment, service disruptions, increased support costs and lost revenue.

Total Visibility into SSL Environment

Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center answers many enterprises' call for an easily achievable central certificate data repository and an affordable, automated scanning service that provides timely and efficient discovery of certificate data across diverse networks. Highly optimized discovery capabilities, advanced notification and scheduling features and rich reporting functionality on the intelligence collected from the network encourage both proactive certificate management and peace of mind for enterprises.

Essential Business Continuity and Compliance

Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center automatically evaluates certificates nearing expiration and triggers alerts based on an administrator's configurations. By vastly reducing the risk of unknown or unwanted certificates on enterprise networks, Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center minimizes costly surprise certificate expirations or high-risk rogue certificates, and thus helps ensure business continuity. Moving forward, Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center is expected to provide policy compliance checking to ensure enterprise certificates discovered meet internal or regulatory policies.

Improved Operational Efficiency

Centralization and automation are an improvement over current scattered and manual SSL accounting processes in spreadsheets, which historically have been error-prone, did not effectively track all certificates, and presented an additional time-consuming burden on already swamped IT staff. Data visibility frees IT staff to perform other core duties and actually save time through proactive management. Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center also aims to add relevant capabilities to its feature set around automating SSL renewal and installation on a number of enterprise applications to further reduce management overhead and allow IT administrators to focus on more important tasks.

Availability

Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center beta is available now. For more information, please visit: http://bit.ly/oVYur4

Quotes

"Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center illustrates Symantec's commitment to helping enterprises get the most out of their SSL Certificate investments. Over the last year, this service was developed in consultation with more than 25 Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies with the key goal to create a simple and usable solution to centralize certificate data and automate core lifecycle processes. Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center will make certificate management easier than ever -- an important advantage as more enterprises adopt cloud-based certificate solutions to power the next generation of security applications." -- Fran Rosch, Vice President, Trust Services, Symantec Corp.

"Implementation of centralized policy controls for the lifecycle of SSL certificates and automation of certificate updates and maintenance can result in operational improvements, lower risk of service downtime as well as the ability to better identify rogue certificates. Organizations are already faced with the challenge of visibility into the existing estate of SSL certificates from multiple certificate authorities. This challenge will be further compounded as digital certificates for authentication and secure communications proliferate through adoption of cloud-based services, virtual machine sprawl and distribution of certificates to endpoints, particularly mobile endpoints. Cross-platform approaches, such as Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center, can provide the tools to tackle this challenge through greater degree of visibility into the state and distribution of certificates and by improving rates of automation." -- Steve Coplan, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Security Practice, the451 Group

Related

Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center

SSL Certificates

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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.