McAfee Looks To SMEs With Web And Email Appliance

Just days after McAfee warned smaller companies to increase their security spend, it has announced a new version of its email and web security appliance, targeted firmly at the SMB sector.

Version 5.5 of the McAfee Email and Web Security Appliance, expected to be available globally later this quarter, is McAfee’s first appliance to link to global threat intelligence from its Artemis and TrustedSource technologies. Through appliance clustering with load balancing, multiple appliances can be clustered to share scanning responsibilities for improved resiliency, scalability and consolidated management and reporting.

Dave Macey, general manager of the company’s network security business unit, said the appliance also provides customers with email and web usage policy enforcement capabilities, compliance tools, informative dashboards and comprehensive reporting.

“McAfee’s combined intelligence capabilities add an essential layer of protection to guard against today’s most advanced threats and work by accumulating data from millions of sensors, creating a real-time profile of all suspicious activity and content, and then watching for deviations based upon expected behaviour,” he said.

The company has also simplified installation, with auto-detecting network settings and a user-friendly configuration wizard, which includes new content policy wizards. These wizards offer simplified creation and setup of content policies and advanced dictionaries to simplify policy creation, which McAfee said enables greater enforcement flexibility and reduces false positives and configuration errors.

URL filtering is also included in the 5.5 release at no additional cost. Integrated into the appliance, the URL filtering includes more than 90 website categories providing granular web usage monitoring and policy enforcement. In addition, the URL filtering includes the McAfee Web Reporter package for simplified viewing of web utilisation and trends.

“Customers want advanced email and web security technology that is available as a single solution under a single management console – with the McAfee Email and Web Security Appliances, there is no duct tape required,” said James Foster, CEO of McAfee Elite Partner Ciphent. “McAfee is different from the competition in that it never limits users to a single policy for all users, and all features for both email and web are inherently included across the board.”

UK pricing details were not available.