McAfee Aims to Ease Security Management

Security provider McAfee pulled the covers off the latest version of ePolicy Orchestrator on Sept. 17, touting its interoperability and several new features allowing users to manage security products for the endpoint and network.

ePO 4.0 enables users to unite the management of network, data and endpoint security under one console, McAfee officials said. Calling it a big change, McAfee CEO Dave DeWalt said ePO 4.0 now enables customers to correlate data and push signatures to network file-based appliances as well as endpoint appliances.

"And of course, a big part of that is the ability to do interoperability with other third-party products or competitor products, and weve released a SDK, software development kit, that allows us to build connectors and other capabilities into that," DeWalt said.

Resource Library:

McAfee, of Santa Clara, Calif., also announced the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance, a program designed to help technology partners easily integrate their products with ePO. The program will provide APIs and SDKs for faster integration with ePO. When ePO 4.0 becomes generally available on Sept. 25, it will offer support for Symantec products. Support for other products will be forthcoming over the next few quarters, DeWalt said.

McAfee traded barbs with Symantec, of Cupertino, Calif., earlier this year regarding Symantecs yet-to-be-shipped Endpoint Protection version 11, code-named Hamlet.

"We feel like weve really leapfrogged the competition," DeWalt said, adding that ePO 4.0 includes data oriented-security and is going to ship in more than 20 languages.

At the endpoint, ePO 4.0s data leak prevention capabilities mean users can keep content from leaving the machine, he said.

"It protects USB ports, keeps you from printing content you shouldnt print out or copying it off to a drive, or any type of data loss from a laptop," he said. "We have that capability as well as network-based data blocking and protection, so we have the ability to classify content and if anyone e-mails it or sends it off to any protocol outside the firewall we can block."

DeWalt said McAfee remains proud to be a pure-play security company.

"Risk management is a key piece to that [focus] because vulnerability discovery, remediation and ultimately compliance reporting of security operations are part of our strategy," he said.

Check out eWEEK.coms Security Center for the latest security news, reviews and analysis. And for insights on security coverage around the Web, take a look at eWEEKs Security Watch blog.