Computer security company McAfee plans to acquire Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) technology provider NitroSecurity.

SIEM offerings provides complete visibility and situational awareness to protect critical information and infrastructure.

McAfee expects that NitroSecurity’s technology, combined with its own security management capabilities, will give organisations greater visibility into their enterprise endpoint assets, underlying network infrastructure, specific security threats and risks and system vulnerabilities across their entire IT environment, said McAfee.

Users can leverage the information to assess their enterprise and operational risk profile and security posture, analyse and institute a range of corrective actions, such as issuing new configurations, implementing new policies and deploying recent software updates through a single management console enterprise.

NitroSecurity helps McAfee significantly expand its Risk and Compliance and Global Threat Intelligence capabilities, said the company.

NitroSecurity’s SIEM management gives customers a single security platform for event analysis and management across the enterprise. The integration expands the capability of the McAfee ePO platform to view events, activity and logs created by networks, databases and applications.

The McAfee ePO platform can leverage the extended SIEM capabilities to more rapidly institute a range of monitoring and mitigation actions.

McAfee Risk and Compliance business unit general manager and senior vice-president Stuart McClure said McAfee is focused on keeping its customers safe with optimised security and risk management offerings.

"McAfee has taken another significant step toward this goal with the proposed acquisition of NitroSecurity. With NitroSecurity’s technology and talent, McAfee can expand its reach into new markets, secure new platforms and strengthen its hold as the leader in the security risk management market," said McClure.

NitroSecurity chairman and chief executive officer Ken Levine said as a long standing McAfee Security Innovation Alliance partner, we know that NitroSecurity’s technology can provide the McAfee customer base with the highest level of security and compliance across their IT environment.

"NitroSecurity’s technology supports a broad range of information sources including network security devices, firewalls, operating system and application logs, vulnerability assessment scans, identity and access management systems and privacy systems. It will complement the extensive McAfee security portfolio and help to meet the demanding compliance and protection needs of our joint customers," said Levine.

NitroSecurity team will be incorporated into the McAfee Risk and Compliance business unit, headed by McClure said McAfee.

LogLogic CEO Guy Churchward said the news from IBM and McAfee, and the increasing complexity of virtualisation and cloud, only serves to elevate the need to centrally collect for not only security but IT forensics, but compliance and IT operational efficiencies.

"Overall today’s news says two things: First, this is an exciting space to be in, and it will continue to change rapidly. Second, as the largest independent pure play and leader in supporting managed and cloud services it really validates our strategy in centrally managing an IT data repository. We’d assume both Q1 and Nitro customers will see the same level of customer disruption seen with ArcSight," said Churchward.