Norton Small Business Targets Companies with Fewer Than 20 Employees

Today, global security company Symantec announced the release of Norton Small Business, a new security tool for businesses with fewer than 20 employees.

In an interview with Small Business Trends, Andy Singer, Senior Director of Consumer and Small Business Product Marketing explained the software is aimed at companies too small for an IT administrator.

The software is also designed to be flexible and to protect a network of consumer mobile devices and laptops, the kind more often used by very small businesses.

Though small business owners might mistakenly believe their companies aren’t large enough to attract cyber criminals’ attention, this may not be the case.

According to the most recent Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, small businesses were targeted in 30 percent of all cyber attacks last year. Singer explains:

“Hackers use a small business as a stepping stone to get to a big business.”

Small businesses like law or accounting firms are often targeted for their client information. These businesses generally have less secure data than the larger companies they may have as clients making them prime targets.

Larger more complex security platforms might protect a company’s entire server and make it more difficult to add new phones or other mobile devices not already on the network.

But Norton Small Business offers a single control portal which allows you to hit one button to “add devices” and another to “send invites” to employees allowing them to add their personal or work devices, Singer says.

The software also offers a scalable pricing structure to make adding devices to your security plan more flexible. For example, Norton Small Business lets you cover your first five devices for $99 per year. Covering 10 devices would be $199 annually and 20 would be $399 per year. Each additional device added to the security network would then be an additional $20 prorated against the annual subscription period, Singer explains.

The system also allows you to remove protection from an employee’s device remotely once he or she leaves the company. The flexibility to add and remove devices from the security network also allows integration of personal devices, says Singer.

This flexibility to deal with devices that might serve both personal and business functions is another way Norton Small Business was specifically tailored to the very small business market. It is a market including approximately 20 million small businesses in the U.S., Singer adds.

Singer says use of Symantec’s Norton team, a company brand generally associated with consumer technology, is another example of how the company is working to create a tool that will be helpful to small businesses reliant on consumer solutions.

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Source: Small Business Trends

Norton Small Business Targets Companies with Fewer Than 20 Employees