Dive Brief:
- AWS solidified another major customer and announced Symantec chose the cloud provider as its "strategic infrastructure provider" last week, according to a company announcement. The partnership is rooted in AWS' capabilities in cloud, data, analytics, ML and container management.
- The cybersecurity vendor and Amazon have a symbiotic relationship. Symantec has a "data lake" on AWS which gathers troves of data daily from 175 million endpoints as part of its "cloud-first" project.
- Using the AWS cloud allows Symantec to serve its software to the "most risk-sensitive enterprise customers" that also use AWS. Symantec's Integrated Cyber Defense strategy carried a lot of weight on the decision, according to Raj Patel, VP of cloud platform engineering at Symantec.
Dive Insight:
Leading cloud vendors want and thrive off the reputation of servicing other trusted names in IT. Despite the recent blows to Symantec's reputation, including Google downgrading its SSL certificates, its partnerships with dominating cloud providers may help the company dig itself out of rut.
The market for cloud security is forecast to grow 28% in five years, and current cybersecurity practices are shaped by a secure cloud, multifactor authentication and ML. Without these practices, cybersecurity vendors like Symantec risk losing customers that are digitally transforming.
Amazon's annual tech conference, re:Invent, is this week and is expected to bring a list of new customers, though this announcement only comes about a month after Symantec announced its partnership with the Microsoft Azure cloud.
The Azure partnership was made to bring Symantec's Norton security products to about 50 million customers globally. The hybrid cloud approach was set to reduce Symantec's operational costs and move its e-commerce system to Azure.
Azure and AWS both have high stakes in partnering with Symantec, but the hybrid cloud approach is not uncommon. Half of all digital companies use more than one IaaS provider. In fact, the most common combination of public/public cloud providers is AWS and Azure.
