14 DAY TRIAL // Security hardware appliances have proved to be an unfriendly territory for Symantec as the company has confirmed a major shift in its investment policy regarding network and gateway security business. All future investment in the SGS, SNS 7100 (Symantec Network Security), an IPS appliance, and SGS Advanced Manager 3.0 appliances used to manage and configure SGS devices, are to come to a halt.
Signaling Gateway Security appliances are combination of network firewall, intrusion detection and prevention, anti-spam, anti-virus, content filtering, and Virtual Private Network. The discontinued investments in rack-mountable security hardware doesn't mean that Symantec will also be ending support or sale of already existing products or that it will seize development of such technologies.
"Avoid investing in SGS and SNS products. Move to other solutions at the next refresh point," a Gartner advisory written by analysts Greg Young and John Pescatore warned. "Symantec is terminating its investments in the SGS multifunction appliance and SNS intrusion prevention system products. Symantec also recently ended support for the Symantec Enterprise Firewall product."
"Instead of designing the hardware ourselves, we'll look to partners to help us do that," a company representative said. This is equivalent to a new strategy from Symantec in the security services market, rather than continuing on a path of investing in its non lucrative share of the security appliance market.