Today’s IT challenges come in a dizzying number of shapes and sizes.

It might be a security threat breaching your firewall. Or the result of simple human error when applying a software patch. It might be a catastrophic infrastructure failure. Or an unpredictable natural disaster.

What all of these challenges have in common is that they put vital business information at risk. And for small and midsize businesses, much of this information flows through Microsoft Windows environments.

As you increasingly rely on sophisticated Windows technologies to support your objectives, the risks to your business operations grow. Read on to discover the keys to ensuring a more stable, secure, and available Windows environment.

Let’s begin with three questions every business must be able to answer confidently:

1. How are you protecting your desktops, laptops, servers, and mobile devices? This means knowing how you are guarding against external as well as internal threats.
2. What are you currently doing to control spam and protect email from today’s growing threats? This covers viruses and worms as well as phishing threats.
   
3. How quickly can you recover from a loss or disaster? This includes data, applications, and computer systems.
   

Symantec helps SMBs get ahead of the ever-changing threat landscape with market-leading endpoint security, messaging security, and data and system protection solutions designed to provide superior information protection for the Windows environment.

Endpoint security
The past two years have witnessed an explosion of new malicious code threats. This increase in new threats is indicative of the increasing professionalization of malicious code and the existence of organizations that employ programmers dedicated to the production of these threats. A group of programmers can create a larger number of new threats than can a single malicious code author.

In spite of these developments, many smaller businesses continue to think that only large companies are being targeted. In fact, organizations of all sizes (and all users of Windows systems) are at risk of attack.

Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition combine anti-virus with advanced threat prevention to defend against malware for laptops, desktops, and servers. These products provide protection against even the most sophisticated attacks that evade traditional security measures, such as rootkits, zero-day attacks, and mutating spyware.

Messaging security
As companies grow, so do the complexities of managing their messaging infrastructure. While a small startup might focus on blocking viruses, growing companies may soon find other challenges that prevent email servers from running at peak performance. Such organizations might face storage limitations due to spam and growing email traffic, the need to protect PST files on mobile laptops, legal compliance issues, and new security threats that are introduced with increased reliance on IM.

The key is to keep spam, viruses, IM worms, and other security threats out, while keeping intellectual property, confidential information, and proprietary data in. By accomplishing these key objectives, you can proactively manage the risks of attack, reduce overall message volume, lower storage requirements, and control costs. And since message volume, particularly spam, seriously impacts email services, comprehensive security can markedly improve Microsoft Exchange performance and help maintain user productivity.

Symantec provides proven antivirus and antispam solutions to protect messaging environments from external threats and enforce IT policies to ensure that sensitive information does not leave the company via outbound email.

Symantec offers small and midsize businesses the industry’s leading email, instant messaging, and archiving solutions, which work together to provide comprehensive protection. With these solutions, you can effectively manage and monitor your Windows messaging systems and ensure your systems and data remain secure and available at all times.

Backup and recovery
Ensuring that your business-critical systems and data are easily recoverable and well managed is essential for keeping your business productive and profitable. Without proper protection, it could take your company days, if not weeks, and require significant expenditures to recover important business information from an infrastructure failure, natural disaster, or simple human error.

Symantec backup and recovery solutions provide industry-leading protection for critical data and systems, which in turn can keep your business up and running efficiently. These solutions deliver market-leading backup and recovery protection from server to desktop, providing data protection for the latest Windows Server 2008 environments and support for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual systems. With granular recovery features and continuous data protection for critical Microsoft applications, Symantec’s solutions help ensure that business-critical data is efficiently protected and can be quickly recovered — down to an individual email or document.

Symantec also offers a disk-based system recovery solution for Windows-based servers, desktops, and laptops. It allows businesses to recover from system loss or disasters in minutes, not hours or days — even to dissimilar hardware platforms, virtual environments, or in remote, unattended locations.

Conclusion
Today most small and midsize organizations rely on Microsoft Windows to run their business and keep their employees productive. And each day, these organizations have to protect against viruses and other malware, back up and recover mission-critical data and systems, and manage their Windows environment to keep everything running smoothly.

Given these challenges, it’s not surprising that companies are under increasing pressure, especially when staff and resources are limited. The new Symantec Protection Suite combines all the essential solutions to help ensure that information as well as desktops, laptops, servers, mobile devices, and messaging infrastructure are always secure, well managed, and accessible in Windows environments. Ultimately, Symantec solutions provide the essential protection you need with minimal hassle so you can focus your resources on the success of your business.