McAfee Expands Reach With Endpoint Security Suites

McAfee has expanded its offerings for the business community after it introduced two new streamlined security suites.

With McAfee Complete Endpoint Protection, offered in Enterprise and Business editions, the company is looking to simplify management and deployment of its endpoint security technologies throughout an IT environment.

One Stop Shop

“What we are trying to do is give people everything they need out of the box in a simple way – in a consumable way – and help our channel and our customers actually use and get the advantage [from] them,” Simon Hunt, McAfee vice president and CTO of endpoint security, told eWEEK.

Unveiled on 29 May, the suites include several McAfee technologies, including dynamic whitelisting from McAfee Application Control for PCs, rootkit protection from Deep Defender and real-time security management via Real Time for McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO). They also include Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), which is now fully integrated with McAfee ePO, and Risk Advisor, which helps administrators see what assets are at highest risk so they can better prioritize what assets to protect first.

The idea behind the suites is to get customers to use technology and features they previously may have been reluctant to enable either due to time constraints or because they did not understand the features’ importance. For example, while many organisations understand the threat of viruses, some still do not recognize the threat rootkits pose, Hunt said.

“If you say, ‘do you consider yourself at risk from viruses,’ everybody knows that,” he said. “But that’s only 30 percent of the problem.”

With the central management of the new product suites, installation time can be cut significantly, something that is important given the time demands on IT administrators today, according to Hunt.

Just 10 years ago, vendors in some ways were rewarded for the complexity of their products, he said.

“The more features you had, the better your product was. That isn’t the world today,” he explained.

Now vendors must keep software simple because users lack the time to choose among more complicated features, he noted.

Big Red Button

“These security architects are so busy, they love the features underneath the covers, but they want the big red button,” Hunt said. “As an industry we need to aspire to give them that big red button.”

A central part of that strategy is Real Time for McAfee ePO, which allows administrators to manage security across all of an enterprise’s devices. It is also a key part of McAfee’s Security Connected vision in which the security and intelligence capabilities are integrated together to better protect enterprises.

“With the McAfee ePO platform we receive heartbeat status in real time, while gaining visibility into important background information so that we can conduct comprehensive statistical analysis and reporting,” said Rick Snyder, endpoint security supervisor at Boston Scientific, in a statement. “As a medical device company dedicated to less-invasive medicine, we see the McAfee ePO platform as the most effective solution for managing our entire environment from a single point.”

Both product suites are available 29 May.

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Originally published on eWeek.