McAfee discussed its security strategy, which the company has dubbed "Security Connected."
McAfee is pushing a new initiative it calls "Security Connected"
that puts an emphasis on correlating information from its security products to
better protect devices.
According to McAfee, the approach is meant to help businesses apply more
intelligent and effective security. The enemy of Security Connected is a siloed
security strategy found in many businesses where disparate technologies are
used to address problems individually rather than holistically, explained
Martin Ward, senior director of risk and compliance at McAfee.
"You can never chase the threat curve and think you are going to keep
up with it," Ward said. "The right approach to that is to take ... a
Security Connected approach, where we're connecting our security products and
connecting our security intelligence so that they can all work in concert to
prevent the more advanced threats that are occurring out there today."
The need for the Security Connected approach is being driven in part by the
consumerization
of IT, said Kevin LeBlanc, senior director of product marketing for endpoint
security at McAfee.
"The challenge that customers are going through that we're seeing from
an organization perspective is that consumer devices-the iPhone, Android the
iPad tablet-have now become indispensable productivity work tools,"
LeBlanc said. "And more and more information workers ... are using these
tools in our day-to-day business life, which is providing pressure on the
corporations to enable access to applications and business data on the go."
"The IT landscape is rapidly changing," said Chris Christiansen,
vice president of security products and services at IDC,
in a statement. "Virtualization of servers and endpoints, shifting of data
and services to the cloud, and the consumerization of IT is creating new holes
in previously protected systems and networks. This is a fundamental shift from
even just a few years ago when the bifurcation points between business and
personal, outside and inside, and us-and-them was more visible."
Security Connected extends across McAfee's portfolio of security and
reporting technologies, ranging from product integration to work with the
company's partner ecosystem to deliver services to customers and ensure product
compatibility.
Two key pieces of the strategy are the releases this week of Endpoint
Security 9.0 and Security Management 5.0. Endpoint Security extends protection
to any device, ranging from desktops to virtual machines to mobile devices and
embedded systems. The new McAfee Security Management platform, meanwhile,
offers a centralized management platform with new interfaces and software
development kits to enable businesses to integrate it into existing business
processes.
Under Security Connected, if a
malicious
file is discovered on a laptop or other device, "we'll not only send
information about that piece of malware up to our intelligence cloud, but we'll
also send what Website did it come from, what network port did it come from,
information like that so we can ... isolate that threat and prevent it from
spreading and exploding anywhere in the environment," Ward said.
"Disjointed point products simply won't work with today's businesses,"
said George Kurtz, McAfee's CTO, in a
statement. "Security ... needs to be connected and correlated, with shared
intelligence, and centrally managed."
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