Symantec Corp. provided customers and partners their first look at Symantec O3, a new cloud security platform designed to protect all enterprise cloud applications and cloud infrastructures.

Symantec O3 combines access control, information protection and compliance control in a single security solution, allowing enterprise customers to extend their internal security policies to public and private cloud services.

Cloud computing is one of the most significant IT trends. Enterprise adoption of SaaS, public or private clouds promises to drive significant cost and complexity reduction. However, concerns over security, compliance and trust still represent a significant barrier to adoption. These new cloud platforms are not inherently insecure but comprehensive security and compliance solutions for the cloud are still missing.

Symantec O3 will help to fill that void by establishing a new security control point that applies consistent identity and information security across all cloud services. Symantec O3 provides three core security layers. The cloud access control layer leverages an enterprise existing identity infrastructure for authentication while enabling authorization and federation services. The information security layer builds on Symantec leading DLP and PGP encryption technologies to automatically detect, block and encrypt confidential information before it is stored in the cloud. Moreover, by virtue of being in line with all cloud traffic, the Symantec O3 visibility layer aggregates all cloud-related security events, to provide the foundation for a comprehensive cloud audit solution.

According to a recent Symantec survey, 44 percent of CEOs said they were cautious about moving business-critical applications to the cloud, with 76 percent citing security as a main concern.1 Symantec O3 will give businesses the confidence to more rapidly shift enterprise resources to public and private clouds.

Symantec O3 is now in an early access beta program and is scheduled to be generally available in 2012.