Symantec puts its own intelligence officers into your business

Symantec is launching a novel subscription business today where it’s renting out its security expertise to corporations that need constant vigilance in the war against cybercrime. If you subscribe, you get your very own Symantec employee.

And this isn’t just an ordinary employee. It’s one of Symantec’s finest, a trained expert who can look at your security infrastructure and tell you what you need to know from Symantec’s own worldwide trove of security intelligence. It calls the program the Symantec Cyber Threat Analysis Program. The company is unveiling it as part of the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this week.

For prices starting at $325,000, your corporation can get the full-time use of Symantec’s on-site expert, who provides the bridge between your company’s own private security needs and the sensitive data that Symantec collects from its worldwide customer base. The idea is to use the information and the human expert to move fast to plug security gaps.

It’s a new approach to the business of consulting, where smaller companies typically provide an expert to deal with big corporations. Only this way, Symantec says, the corporation gets access to a lot more information than a small-time consultant could ever have at his or her fingertips. The company has trained more than 30 analysts in the past year said Ted Donat, a product director at Symantec.

In April, Symantec reported that it had identified more than 1.6 million pieces of new malicious code during 2008. On average, it blocked more than 245 million cyber attacks each month during the year. The problem is only going to get worse.

The quality of the service Symantec provides here will depend on how well it has trained its analysts. And if it gets too much demand for this service, its staff of experts is going to get stretched thin. If you’re thinking that Symantec might try this in our homes too, it’s not so far from the truth. We wrote about a slightly different approach to the idea of providing expertise onsite in the home arena with Symantec’s Project Guru, which helps a home security expert assist family members more easily.

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