Symantec O3 aims to protect business in the cloud

Symantec has launched a cloud security management platform designed to allow enterprises to extend internal security policies into public and private clouds.

The platform — called Symantec O3 — is designed to protect cloud applications and infrastructures, and provides a single 'control point' for cloud security, Symantec said in a statement on Tuesday.

"As organisations work to embrace cloud delivered services, they struggle to balance the potential upside benefits against the many challenges created as their sensitive information flows between an increasing number of solution providers, over networks, through organisations and down to devices outside of their infrastructure," said Art Gilliland, senior vice president, information security group, Symantec.

Symantec O3 allows companies to consistently enforce employee identification and information security in public and private clouds, be it application or infrastructure-based, said Symantec.

'Cloud access control' allows companies to keep employing an existing identity infrastructure, and use it to authorise and federate identities in different cloud services.

Symantec O3 has data-loss prevention and PGP encryption to detect, encrypt or block confidential information. The platform also includes monitoring functionality that aggregates cloud security incidents.

The company has been working on object-based encryption since at least 2009, when it announced that the cloud will eventually be "part of the way everybody accomplishes computing".

Symantec has also experimented with cloud-based operating systems in the form of 'GoEverywhere'. The beta project was closed down in June 2009 after six months, with Symantec saying it did not intend to release it as a standalone service.

Symantec O3 is currently in beta, and the company plans to make it generally available in 2012.