Azernews.Az

By Nigar Orujova

Growth of the information security market in Azerbaijan was 20 percent in 2013 fiscal year, Symantec Manager for Cooperation with Partners in the CIS and Georgia Pavel Nazarevich said.

Symantec Company is a U.S information security system producer.

He added that the company has the most optimistic forecasts of market growth for the current fiscal year that ends in March.

Over the past two years, the company has implemented major projects in Azerbaijan on implementation of archiving systems that enable the organizations to optimize the performance of e-mail and file systems.

"Advances in implementing solutions for the protection of confidential information are available in both the public and the financial sector. There are also good trends in the sale of backup and anti-virus solutions," Nazarevich said.

A renaissance of information security has begun in Azerbaijan, he added. The market has been struggling with the problems of information security at the level of the classical anti-virus solutions and heuristic signatures for a long time.

"Now the main trend of development comes from the financial sector. There are also prospects for long-term development in the public sector, where areas such as network security, data protection will be needed in any case. Overall, the dynamics is satisfactory and every year more and more different projects are realized. However, the main direction for us is using the systems of archiving and search in the archives, which allow us to realize a great deal of goals in the field of information security," he said.

Azerbaijani market, Nazarevich added, is of particular importance for the company Symantec.

Azerbaijan's Information Security market along with the markets of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus is one of the strategic markets in the CIS countries, and the company Symantec has optimistic plans of growth in two areas - infrastructure solutions and information security solutions.

"For many years we did not have a clear strategy on the Azerbaijani market. Now we have started to invest in development. Just from the last year, the company has a new team, that is engaged in business development in Azerbaijan. Our work is now as directed to promote the brand and to work with customers on spot.

"The new certified partners will appear from October. The pool of partners will also be changed andthe distributors will be the main focus.We intend to introduce all these global measures in the market of Azerbaijan," Nazarevich said.

Earlier, he said Symantec has determined the strategic directions of its business development in the Azerbaijani market for the next two years

"The company intends to focus on the development of backup copy systems for the next two years," he said. "Organizing the integrated backup copy projects for the potential customers will be the main mission of the company. The matter rests in uniting the complex copy tasks in a single solution, whether virtual or physical, based on different systems."

"Our main goal is to make a backup copy in the form of a single solution and provide the customers with a full set to protect the administration against all risks. At present, we see that large companies and the public sector do not use a backup copy solution as a whole in Azerbaijan. There are many multifaceted approaches. These are different solutions for different spheres, and even different systems. We see great prospects for our growth here."

"An archiving system segment, which is quite young, will be an important strategic direction of Symantec business development in Azerbaijan," he said.

"Archiving is our strategic hope," he added. "We see great potential here and good trends for growth. We have optimistic forecasts for growth on the Azerbaijani market for the next two years."

As for development, the number of attacks and virus activity, Symantec representative outlined the increasing complexity in connection with the information security threats. The plotters do not use simple techniques as earlier. The attacks are mainly targeted.

"Less mass attacks are observed today," he said. "The plotters mainly use DDOS attacks and special malicious programs. There is a trend of causing commercial damage towards competitors. We disclose a lot of targeted attacks both at the state and at the commercial levels. DATA Centre Security is used to protect important servers and nodes. Special attention is paid to the protection of ATMs which are often exposed to hacker attacks."