Symantec Offers Free Information Risk Assessment Tool for Australian & New Zealand Businesses

Symantec Offers Free Information Risk Assessment Tool for Australian & New Zealand Businesses

Sydney, AUSTRALIA – 25 August, 2010 − Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced a free new tool that helps small and midsized businesses (SMBs)  in Australia and New Zealand  understand the  potential information risks that can affect them.  Security risks including viruses or hacker attacks, lost or stolen equipment, accidental deletion and natural disasters, can put information at risk and may lead to  serious damage to profitability. The Symantec Risk Assessment Tool uses a quick, simple-to-complete online questionnaire to assess security risks, assign a risk rating, and then provide recommendations to help businesses improve their information protection.

Information is critical to businesses of all sizes and SMBs are facing increased risks to their confidential information— including bank account numbers, credit card information and customer and employee records.  Now the Symantec Risk Assessment Tool helps SMBs make better decisions regarding information protection by providing useful information and recommended strategies for helping them safeguard their businesses from external threats, internal threats and information loss.

Threats to information security can have a significant impact on businesses.  According to Symantec’s SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey, Asia Pacific and Japan, September 2009:

• The average cost of downtime is $30,000 in Australia and $15,000 in New Zealand per incident. This covers productivity, lost sales and replacement equipment.  Incidents result in downtime of at least eight hours for 40 percent of all businesses.

• In the last 12 months, Australian and New Zealand businesses have experienced power outages (79 percent); natural disasters, such as fire, flood, and storm (70 percent); a virus or hacker attack (67 percent); employees accidentally deleting information (65 percent); and computer system failure (63 percent).

• Yet, 30 percent of businesses do not have a plan to deal with these disasters.

“With information protection, prevention is certainly better than a cure and the Symantec Risk Assessment Tool helps businesses address some of the most common information risks before they become a threat to their business,” said Steve Martin, director, small and midsized businesses, Pacific region, Symantec.  “Small businesses today operate in a challenging environment and every business, regardless of size, relies on credible information to operate effectively.  By simply checking how well their information and their business is protected, business owners can save a lot of money and stress in the long run.  The Symantec Risk Assessment Tool helps businesses to make that assessment simply and efficiently and helps business owners find out about the potential risks to their information.”

Barriers to Preventing Information Security Threats
Leading barriers to security cited by Australian and New Zealand SMBs include a lack of time (38 percent) and an absence of employee skills (40 percent)*.  A lack of awareness of current threats (31 percent) was also cited as a factor*.  By using the Symantec Risk Assessment Tool, businesses can gain a quick but expert appraisal that tells businesses what they need to know, in terms they can understand.

“Many small businesses don’t know exactly what information risks they face or how quickly they’d be able to recover if they were compromised.  By identifying how vulnerable they are with the Symantec Risk Assessment Tool and by ensuring they put key safeguards in place, businesses can improve the security of their information and avoid unnecessary costs to their organisations,” added  Martin.

The Symantec Small Business Risk Assessment Tool is free and can be found at: http://www.assessyourbusinessrisk.com/customer

Top Five Information Protection Tips for SMBs
Symantec has put together the below tips for SMBs to help ensure they are protecting all the information held by their business.

Get into back-to-school mode:  Develop Internet security guidelines and educate employees about Internet safety, security and the latest threats.  Having employees who know what they can click on and what they should stay away from is an important step.  It is also important to change passwords regularly and never share them with anyone.

The front door is locked—what about the company information?
SMBs are facing increased risks to their confidential information so safeguarding this data is critical.  Just one instance of leaked information can be very damaging to a company’s reputation.  Install comprehensive IT security to ensure your business’ information—whether it’s credit card information, customer data or employee records—is safe.

Put in place an effective backup and recovery plan
Protecting information is more than using antivirus software.  Being able to back up and recover information is critical to ensuring desktops, servers and applications can continue to run smoothly in the case of a disruption—whether it’s a flood, earthquake, virus or system failure.  One outage could mean customer dissatisfaction and costly downtime. 

Secure email and your access to the web
Select security software that can help protect against spam and email threats so you can protect sensitive information and spend more time on day-to-day activities.  Spammers and phishers will use current events and social engineering tactics to get users to give up personal information such as credit card and banking information.

Always on the go?  Don’t forget to protect your endpoints (laptops, smartphones, etc.)
Instead of solely focusing on devices, such as laptops, SMBs need to take a step back and look at where their information is being stored and protect those areas accordingly.  In addition to encryption and security updates, it is important for both managers and employees to manage passwords carefully.  Maintaining strong passwords will help protect the data stored on a laptop if a device is lost or hacked. 

About Symantec
Symantec is a global leader in providing security, storage, and systems management solutions to help consumers and organisations 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.

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* Symantec 2009 Global Small and Mid-sized Business (SMB) Security and Storage survey drew responses from 1,425 small and medium businesses in 17 countries with 100 responses from Australia (50) and New Zealand (50). The size of companies of respondents ranged from 10 to 500 employees.

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