NEW YORK – In addition to its security software offerings, Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) is now getting into the cloud and data services business with its Norton Online Backup and Norton Online.Family solutions.
At its Norton Cyber Crime Day event held here yesterday, Jody Gibney, senior product manager for OnlineFamily.Norton at Symantec, said that with the availability of the Internet and mobile Internet access capabilities, more individuals are now going online.
“New devices such as netbooks make it appealing for consumers to push as many resources as they can to the cloud,” Gibney said. “Symantec has taken a practical approach to address this through an online client and service.”
Norton Online Backup, which is now available online and through Symantec’s retail channels, is a secured, online backup service that’s designed for consumers to help keep their files safe. The solution uses a small desktop agent, which is downloaded on the PC, to restore or download any previously backed up files. The solution is a Web-based consumer offering that uses the Internet browser so users can manage, access and restore their backed up files from anytime, anywhere. Norton Online Backup sells at a suggested price of $49.99 a year and comes with 25GB of online storage for up to five PCs. If extra storage is required, users can purchase more space in 10, 25, 50 and 100GB increments.
“Because people are still storing a lot of data locally and not everyone has moved to the cloud, we wanted to have a hybrid solution that allows an agent to run sitting on the machine,” Gibney said.
Symantec’s OnlineFamily.Norton solution is an Internet-based safety and security solution offering that helps parents monitor and manage their child’s online activity and Internet usage patterns. Parents can find out what their kids are searching for on the Internet by viewing their most commonly-searched terms. In addition, if kids input an incorrect age on a social network account, parents will be notified of this too.
“There’s a growing gap between parents and kids,” Gibney said.”Parents don’t understand what their kids are doing online, so it’s hard to provide guidance and advice to them. Particularly with social networking sites, parents have a hard time understanding what the online landscape looks like.”
“The solution provides a baseline of general information so parents can start having conversations with their children,” Gibney said.
Currently, Gibney says OnlineFamily.Norton is only available online, however delivering this solution through the channel is something the company is currently considering.