"In Malaysia, companies, especially in sectors such as banking, logistics, manufacturing, government, and insurance, face a rapid growth in complexity of IT systems," he said. "In the current downturn, when we expect a slowdown in network growth in the coming year, it is an opportune time for Malaysian IT managers to take a breather and look into how to manage their networks better."

Open collaborative architecture

"In 10 years, the role of IT has changed from being an afterthought to becoming an absolutely critical aspect of business," said Hanley. "Companies can no longer manually control data in an era of shrinking budgets."

Functions such as antivirus, security, systems management, network access control, and encryption are part of the solution," he said. "As part of its endpoint control integration strategy, Symantec integrated the security and management of endpoints to help companies manage security, data loss prevention, and backup and recovery of data."

"We have led the way in terms of virtualisation acquisition," he added. "The new environment when on-demand applications is emerging. This will become an important part of an IT manager's agenda: dealing with the virtual cloud."