The partnership will see IS become Symantec Hosted Services primary route to market in South Africa with a dedicated Symantec SaaS data center hosted on Internet Solutions’ infrastructure.
Symantec intends to leverage its sales force and channel strength to expand across the continent. They will also utilise Internet Solution’s points of presence across the continent to reach the market.
Symantec’s hosted security solutions that will be made available to IS clients include Symantec’s MessageLabs Hosted Email AntiSpam and AntiVirus, MessageLabs Hosted Email Encryption, and MessageLabs Hosted Email Archiving.
“Increasingly, clients are looking to us to provide them with an integrated suite of IT solutions that are easy to implement and require little or no IT resources to manage. They want us to be their trusted advisor and supply the very best technology and performance available globally,” said Hayden Lamberti, Internet Solutions. “Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions present instant benefits to our clients and Symantec’s MessageLabs hosted security solutions offer a broad range of relevant services including email archiving, with rigorous service level agreements, to provide additional confidence and performance assurance.”
Email threats and spam volumes have skyrocketed in recent times, Symantec’s research found that the spam rate in South Africa in August was 91.3% of all email and 1 in every 62.5 emails in South Africa contained a virus.
“There seem to be two major factors affecting the email-borne virus activity in South Africa, firstly the roll out of high-speed internet connectivity over the course of last year; and secondly the recent Fifa World Cup that attracted the attention of scammers and malware authors around the world,” said Jesper Frederiksen, Vice President Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
The Symantec portfolio of SaaS solutions will be made available to IS clients in early 2011, with the Messagelabs email filtering and archiving solutions, forming the foundation layer of the IS Hosted UC offerings.
