Symantec Corp., the owner of Norton antivirus software and other products and services for individuals and organizations, on Monday revealed acquiring LiveOffice, a privately held cloud-based archiving provider, for $115 million.
Symantec said the deal will extend its intelligent information governance offering to the cloud, meaning customers will now have a choice between on-premise, cloud or hybrid delivery of the company's solutions.
Allowing employees to share information freely while also securing such data is critical in an era when workers are increasingly accessing information from a variety of devices like tablets and smartphones, sharing such data through social media and storing it in the cloud, said Symantec, which has announced plans for increased integration between its storage and eDiscovery offerings.
"What were once disparate issues – information management, eDiscovery, and data security – are rapidly coming together due to the explosion of electronically stored information and the on-premise and cloud-based technologies that deliver and disseminate it," said Brian Dye, vice president, Information Intelligence Group, Symantec. "Organizations are increasingly demanding that these issues be addressed in a unified way through information governance."
Thanks to the LiveOffice acquisition, Symantec said it will help organizations store, manage and discover an increasingly broad variety of information, including email, instant messaging, file sharing and social media. The company said the deal also allows for a tighter integration between archiving and its cloud-based email security and management capabilities.
