Business
ICT: Symantec Corporation Enhances Storage Technology
Symantec Corporation has announced enhancements to Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server, the industry-leading heterogeneous storage management and high availability solutions for UNIX, Linux and windows environments.
This enables organisations to capitalise on new storage technology such as solid state drives (SSDs) and thin provisioning, while continuing to reduce cost and complexity through improved performance and scalability.
Additionally, near instantaneous recovery of application is now possible with Veritas Cluster File system through tight integration with oracle, Sybase and IBM DB2, allowing for fast failover of structured information and near linear scalability.
According to the vice president of Product Management, Storage and Availability Management Group, John Kahn, Symantec, as organisation evolves to meet changing business needs; they require an optimised storage infrastructure that is dynamic and flexible.
He said “with this launch, Symantec is providing customers with the ability to effectively utilise the latest storage innovations from solid state drives (SSDs) to thin provisioned hardware, and even virtual environments including Hyper-V, while also providing capabilities needed to optimise any storage or server platform”.
He added that storage foundation gives enterprises the complete solution they needed to transfer their data centers and enable business success”.
Symantec dynamic storage capabilities ensures that organisations storage deployments remain cost-effective as they take advantage of new technologies that increase performance.
This provides complete, coordinated server and storage visibility and policy based, non-disruptive information movement.
Storage foundation automatically optimises heterogeneous storage environments, including those that contain both SSDs and traditional disk storage.
“It is the only storage management solution that can automatically discover SSD devices from leading array and server vendors and optimise data placement on SSD devices transparently”, he added.
Speaking on this development, vice president, system storage at IMB, Mr Doug Balog, said the only thin- friendly file system in the industry, Veritas File System, enable improved storage utilisation by integrating with the thin provisioning ecosystem. Announced last year, the Veritas Thin Reclamation API enables automated space reclamation for thin provisioning storage arrays and is now fully supported by Symantec Partners IBM and 3PAR, with more hardware partners planning to follow suit.
Kahn further stated that Symantec made an improvement on cluster file system and cluster server, by providing improved availability of oracle environments, and also concurrent access to information and requires only the application to be moved.
Symantec helps organisations secure and manage their information driven world with storage management, email archiving and backup.
Cornerstone of Financial Services
A survey of more than 1 000 global finance leaders undertaken by digital payment network Ripple shows that 72% of respondents believe they need to offer a digital asset solution to remain competitive.
According to Ripple, leaders from the banking, fintech, corporate and asset management sector have made it clear that the “digital asset revolution is happening now”.
“Digital assets are quickly becoming a cornerstone of financial services, underpinned by progressive regulation, growing interest from Tier-1 banks, a steady consumer shift from banks to fintech providers, and booming stablecoin adoption,” Ripple says.
The survey was conducted in early 2026 and the findings released in March.
Stablecoin Boon or Bane?
Ripple has experienced significant success in the stablecoin sector since launching its Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin in 2024.
With a market cap of $1.56 billion, it is considered a major regulated player in the market.
No doubt the platform was pleased to learn through its own survey that financial leaders were most bullish about stablecoins.
Roughly three-quarters of respondents believed they could boost cash-flow efficiency and unlock trapped working capital.
Ripple noted that finance leaders were thinking about stablecoins as more than “just a new way to execute payments”; instead, they viewed them as effective tools for treasury management.
In March 2026, Ripple began testing a new trade finance model built around RLUSD in a bid to increase the speed of cross-border payments.
The pilot initiative, developed alongside supply chain finance company Unloq [https://unloq.com], is running on the XRP Ledger inside a testing framework developed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
The Asian city-state is one of the platform’s biggest growth markets.
The idea behind the project is to see whether stablecoin-based settlement can streamline trade finance, too often hampered by reliance on intermediaries and slow reconciliation.
The only potential drawback is that if the initiative takes off, the Ripple to USD price could be negatively affected.
Ripple has always championed its native XRP token as a bridge asset, the “middleman” in the process of a financial institution turning dollars in the US into pounds in the UK, for example.
Ripple converts dollars into XRP and then back into pounds.
If RLUSD can do exactly the same thing, questions will be asked about XRP’s relevance.
That is a bridge Ripple will have to cross if it gets to that point.
Tokenisation Partners
Another interesting finding from Ripple’s survey is that most banks and asset managers are seeking tokenisation partners to help execute their strategies.
Some 89% of respondents said digital asset storage and custody were top priority. “Token servicing/lifecycle management also ranks highly for banks at 82%, while asset managers place greater emphasis on primary distribution at 80%,” Ripple found.
The survey also revealed that just more than half of fintechs and financial institutions want an infrastructure provider that can offer a “one-stop-shop solution”. This rose to 71% among corporate financial leaders.
Ripple attributes this to institutions and firms wanting uncomplicated, cohesive systems.
Infrastructure Rules
In its final analysis, Ripple says companies across the board are looking for partners and solutions that are “secure, compliant, battle-tested and that enable growth and execution”.
“The message is clear: infrastructure decisions made today will shape competitive positioning tomorrow.”
No surprise that this is precisely where Ripple is placing much of its focus.
