Over the last 12 months, the leading players in the IT security industry have not shied away from adding to this position as they have built up their own stances as providers of a single-source, unified threat management (UTM) enterprise protection. From their perspective, this positioning of course makes a tremendous amount of sense, as via the development or acquisition routes they continually add extra functionality to their protection portfolios.
McAfee, with the recent announcement of two new risk management offerings from its Foundstone subsidiary, is taking the UTM model further than most. Its latest offerings, McAfee Foundstone Enterprise 5.0 – a comprehensive priority-based vulnerability management solution, and McAfee Preventsys Compliance Auditor and Risk Analyzer, allow organizations to automate and deliver the manually intensive processes of reporting security compliance.
This is as an important issue because it appears that it is no longer good enough to simply provide the security solutions that protect an organization, you also have to be able to prove to an auditable level of satisfaction that such protection systems are operating satisfactorily on an ongoing basis. To quote George Kutz, a senior vice president of risk management at McAfee, Enterprise customers are increasingly demanding an end-to-end consolidated view of vulnerability, configuration, and compliance information that enables them to manage their security risk.
The new Foundstone Enterprise 5.0 solution and its Compliance and Risk supporting products enable organizations to prioritize and rank their highest-value business assets, then identify the organization’s most critical security vulnerabilities alongside the threats that could exploit them. This is interesting on a number of levels, but fundamentally it addresses a key area of protection in which McAfee did, until this announcement, appear to have a significant technology shortfall.
With its newly released Total Protection for Enterprise solution providing organizations with a comprehensive range of integrated protection services, McAfee has already delivered a significant range of UTM-based functionality – a position that some of the company’s detractors would argue has come about through a ruthless recycling of old technologies. However, that view can probably be kept as a separate discussion! McAfee’s main outstanding issue as a supplier of end-to-end protection services was to provide the information needed to ensure that its protection services could be properly targeted towards key areas of vulnerability, and to allow for more effective responses to these security issues.
From what it has been possible to ascertain so far, McAfee’s Foundstone Enterprise release supports this requirement by providing end-user customer organizations with advanced credential-based scanning services for most major platforms and systems, and, as a result, has the capability to provide an in-depth analysis and understanding of their ongoing vulnerabilities.
In addition, the solution’s simple network management protocol (SNMP) communication feature helps customers to automate operational processes by providing integration with third-party applications, such as BMC Remedy, to simplify patch management activities and ensure closed-loop remediation.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
