McAfee Expands Cloud Data Centre To London

Just a week after Intel completed its acquisition of McAfee, it’s back to business as usual as the security company expands its cloud footprint with a new data centre to power its security software as a service business.

Globalising cloud services

McAfee has activated its fifth cloud data centre in the past 12 months, and another centre is expected in a few weeks, the company said late yesterday. The centres underscore the company’s commitment to growing its email, web and endpoint security and vulnerability management software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, McAfee said.

With the new cloud data centres, McAfee partners can “deliver the highest-grade, global cloud-security footprint,” said Scott Chasin, chief technology officer at McAfee Cloud and Content.

The newest data centre in London joins existing cloud centres in Amsterdam, Sydney, Tokyo, Denver, Atlanta and the San Jose/San Francisco area, Charles Var, director of strategic marketing at McAfee, told eWEEK. The company will be opening new centres in Miami and Hong Kong next, he said.

The data centres are designed to deliver peak performance and redundancy, said Var. An outage or disruption at one data centre will be invisible to McAfee customers and partners because all others should remain unaffected. For example, each data centre operates on multiple power feeds and connects to independent Internet trunks for failover capability, Var said. If issues and problems arise on one trunk, McAfee can quickly and transparently move to the secondary circuit there by isolating customers from the issue, he said.

“We do not want to limit our possibilities,” said Var.

Each region also has a minimum of two data centres so that they can act as a backup to one another, the company said. If any data centre goes offline for whatever reason, the designated backup in that region will be able to pick up the workload, McAfee claimed.

The centres are also carrier-neutral, and do not rely on a single Internet service provider for inbound or outbound network traffic. This way, McAfee can select providers that give the best coverage for the specific area and not be locked into any one provider for all data centres, Var said. McAfee also registers domain names with multiple vendors to help eliminate the risk of any issues with a given registrar.

Keeping up with bandwidth demands

External routing tools such as UltraDNS Managed External DNS service and the Border Gateway Protocol ensures internet traffic is routed from users to the cloud data centre quickly and efficiently, McAfee said. The company’s SaaS Network Operations Centre continuously manages and monitors the data centre to ensure uptime, optimal performance, and to analyse the latest threats and vulnerabilities.

The company also has put in a number of security features to physically secure the data centres, such as biometric scanners controlling who has access inside and continuous video surveillance through closed-circuit TV. To ensure that the data centre is not affected by environmental outages, it has its own high-capacity heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) system, early-warning fire-detection systems, backup generators and UPS power backups, McAfee said.

Intel completed its $7.68 billion acquisition of McAfee on 28 February 2011. Under the terms of the deal, McAfee is a wholly owned subsidiary, and will continue developing and selling security products and services under its own name.

Now that the acquisition has been finalised, McAfee is investigating the possibilities of using the new Intel environments for future data centres.