Symantec and Microsoft have expanded their partnership, with Symantec now delivering additional layers of security to Azure and Office 365.

Azure customers are protected against cyberthreats and are able to “better control and protect corporate use of the cloud, prevent data leaks and help ensure compliance with corporate policies and governmental regulations,” the security vendor said. This news follows Symantec’s announcement of Microsoft as a strategic cloud provider and its use of Azure for critical IT services and for delivery of its Norton consumer products to a global community.

Symantec’s Torjus Gylstorff

Torjus Gylstorff, Symantec’s vice president of worldwide partner sales and worldwide customer success, tells Channel Partners that Symantec partnered with Microsoft to optimize a number of its security products and services to support their joint customers. The partnership creates new opportunities for partners to sell these security offerings to customers that are adopting Office 365 or who are moving workloads to Azure, he said.

“For example, businesses can use Symantec’s cloud-delivered Web Security Service to provide a secure on-ramp to Office 365 applications,” he said. “Policies can be set to ensure that all documents downloaded from Office 365 applications like OneDrive are scanned and sandboxed to prevent malware and zero-day threats from entering the organization. The same is true for document uploads. Information can be scanned using the service’s DLP capabilities to make sure that sharing it in the cloud does not violate compliance or security policies. Customers using Azure can use Symantec Workload Protection to discover and protect all of their workloads in the cloud. Symantec has a full suite of solutions for use with Microsoft cloud applications, including Symantec’s CloudSOC CASB solutions and Email Security.cloud.”

Microsoft and Symantec share a large number of partners, and for those partners, there is a “natural collaborative selling motion that they can take to extend their customers’ security posture to protect all aspects of their cloud usage,” Gylstorff said.

“(The partnership) gives Symantec partners a competitive advantage in that the partners are selling industry-leading security solutions to protect their customers,” he said. “No other vendor has an Integrated Cyber Defense platform that can meet the full breadth of security challenges that enterprises face as they aggressively move to the cloud. Symantec partners now have the opportunity to easily offer extended security solutions like Web Security Service, CloudSOC CASB and Email Security.cloud to Office 365 customers, in addition to Symantec Cloud Workload Protection to enterprises using Azure. Knowing their applications are secure and compliant is a key component to enterprises extending their cloud usage, which is why the Microsoft and Symantec partnership is so powerful for our channel partners.”

“The collaboration between Microsoft and Symantec brings together advanced network security and intelligent cloud infrastructure,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group. “Symantec’s full suite of security and compliance controls complement our broad set of Azure security solutions to provide customers with an ideal, trusted cloud platform.”