McAfee expands its e-mail, Web and endpoint security software as a service capabilities with its fifth new cloud data center in 12 months.
Just a week
after Intel completed its acquisition of McAfee, it's back to business as usual
as the security company expands its cloud footprint with a new data center to
power its security software as a service business.
McAfee has
activated its fifth cloud data center in the past 12 months, and another center
is expected in a few weeks, the company said Mar. 7. The centers underscore the
company's commitment to growing its e-mail, Web and endpoint security and
vulnerability management SAAS offerings, McAfee said.
With the new
cloud data centers, McAfee partners can "deliver the highest-grade, global
cloud-security footprint," said Scott Chasin, chief technology officer at
McAfee Cloud and Content.
The newest
data center in London joins existing cloud centers in Amsterdam, Sydney, Tokyo,
Denver, Atlanta and the San Jose/San Francisco area, Charles Var, director of
strategic marketing at McAfee, told eWEEK. The company will be opening new
centers in Miami and Hong Kong next, he said.
The data
centers are designed to deliver peak performance and redundancy, said Var. An
outage or disruption at one data center will be invisible to McAfee customers
and partners because all others should remain unaffected. For example, each
data center operates on multiple power feeds and connects to independent
Internet trunks for failover capability, Var said. If issues and problems arise
on one trunk, McAfee can quickly and transparently move to the secondary
circuit there by isolating customers from the issue, he said.
"We do
not want to limit our possibilities," said Var.
Each region
also has a minimum of two data centers so that they can act as a backup to one
another, the company said. If any data center goes offline for whatever reason,
the designated backup in that region will be able to pick up the workload,
McAfee claimed.
The centers
are also carrier-neutral, and do not rely on a single Internet service provider
for inbound or outbound network traffic. This way, McAfee can select providers
that give the best coverage for the specific area and not be locked into any
one provider for all data centers, Var said. McAfee also registers domain names
with multiple vendors to help eliminate the risk of any issues with a given
registrar.
External
routing tools such as UltraDNS Managed External DNS service and the Border
Gateway Protocol ensures Internet traffic is routed from users to the cloud
data center quickly and efficiently, McAfee said. The company's SAAS Network
Operations Center continuously manages and monitors the data center to ensure
uptime, optimal performance, and to analyze the latest threats and
vulnerabilities.
The company
also has put in a number of security features to physically secure the data
centers, such as biometric scanners controlling who has access inside and
continuous video surveillance through closed-circuit TV. To ensure that the
data center is not affected by environmental outages, it has its own
high-capacity HVAC system, early-warning fire-detection systems, backup
generators and UPS power backups, McAfee said.
Intel
completed its $7.68 billion acquisition of McAfee on Feb. 28.
Under the terms of the deal, McAfee is a wholly owned subsidiary, and will
continue developing and selling security products and services under its own
name.
Now that the
acquisition has been finalized, McAfee is investigating the possibilities of
leveraging the new Intel environments for future data centers.
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