UPDATED 09:17 EST / NOVEMBER 28 2013

Symantec’s cloud locker falls victim to mobile revolution

Faltering demand for personal computers has led Symantec to shut down its Backup Exec.cloud service, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. The company is pulling the plug on the cloud locker in an effort to slim down and refocus on the rapidly growing mobile market, the new frontier for endpoint security and data protection.

Backup Exec.cloud is pegged as a next-generation “hybrid option to back up data onsite and to the cloud, ensuring fast backups and retrievals and an offsite copy.” The solution is geared towards SMBs and branch offices that need to be able to easily manage their information but also require a degree of customization.

Symantec has alerted users that it will stop selling the service in January. The company explained in a statement that “the PC backup world is changing. Customers want features such as sync and share and mobile access. Backup Exec.cloud was not designed with these features in mind. As a result, Symantec has decided to discontinue Backup Exec.cloud in order to focus on more productive and feature rich cloud-based applications which include this type of functionality.”

Symantec’s decision to discontinue its desktop backup solution comes a few weeks after it scored a major victory against the cybercrimimals behind ZeroAccess, one of the largest known botnets in existence. The firm claims to have disabled close to a quarter of the botnet, which included over 1.9 million infected computers at its height.

Used primarily to perform click fraud and Bitcoin mining, .ZeroAccess utilizes a peer-to-peer mechanism to communicate with infected machines. Symantec researchers exploited a well-known weakness in the underlying architecture to seize some of the bots, and later launched a “Sinkholing operation” to make sure the hackers can’t regain control of the liberated machines.


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