The McAfee Total Protection platform that was announced in April has been developed to provide organizations with a centrally controllable approach to the security management of business systems. In bringing together key McAfee signature technologies, such as anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-spyware, and network access control, it provides a platform of protection capabilities that can be driven from a central administration console.
Overall, the approach that McAfee has taken is to provide protection solutions that address the needs of what it describes as the small-to-medium business (SMB) market, but can also scale up to deliver centrally controlled enterprise services. The SMB edition of the product is pitched towards organizations that have fewer than 100 employees and, for those that require it, can be delivered as a hosted service (from McAfee or one of its many authorized partners). Under these circumstances McAfee is looking to deal with many of the complexity problems that small businesses encounter when attempting to go-it-alone with the deployment of a multi-point security strategy.
For enterprise customers, the product is built around McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator offering, which provides the central management, reporting, and configuration console for the platform’s capabilities. This includes desktop and file server anti-virus scanning, desktop anti-spyware, desktop host intrusion prevention including a combination of both signature and behavioral analysis, desktop firewall, and email server-based anti-virus and anti-spam filtering.
Furthermore, the enterprise ‘Advanced’ version of the product adds network access control (NAC) facilities that enable administrators to limit systems and network access to only those endpoint users that comply with defined corporate security policies – in other words, integrating endpoint security and individual machine status alongside the stated protection requirements of the business.
The new McAfee integrated protection approach applies a business focus to the management of risk. It accepts that there are four underlying principles to risk management that all revolve around an organization’s ability to identify all assets that need to be protected:
1. Measure risk at an individual and asset level.
2. The blocking and protection requirement.
3. Linking of enforcement with compliance and policy needs.
4. The roadmap for dealing with an organization’s ongoing protection needs.
Of course, business security protection continues to be an ever-growing market, and within the McAfee Total Protection Solution core elements of the product set, such as the company’s anti-spyware offering, will need to continue to evolve to keep pace as the security industry attempts to build effective technology that can ultimately get to grips with the genuine problems that the existence of spyware causes.
In essence, with the release of its Total Protection Solution, McAfee has now fully embraced a unified threat protection approach to business security that many of us would argue was long overdue. It changes the game plan for endpoint security, has the potential to reduce risk for corporate customers, and starts to pull enterprise protection away from the point-based build approach that has consistently proved to be over complex and ineffective.
However, if the evidence of this year’s Infosec event is anything to go by, expect to see many more similar product unification announcements from the security industry’s leading players.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
