McAfee Looks To Solve Virtualisation Security Fears

With some UK companies still fretting over the adoption of new technologies, security specialist McAfee has announced its strategy to advance the security options for virtualised environments.

Under Development

McAfee said it is currently developing a platform and application programming interface to provide a framework that will accelerate and address the specific needs of security for virtualised environments.

The platform, Management for Optimised Virtual Environments (MOVE), is designed to provide a common way to develop across the hypervisor vendors, offload resource intensive actions like security policy checking outside of the individual virtual machines and optimise scheduling of these actions based on the overall state of the hypervisor. McAfee plans to provide open source to its partners for security innovation. Utilising the MOVE platform, McAfee intends to release A/V Offloading as its first product for customers. The company said giving customers a way to unify security management across physical and virtual infrastructures has been a major driver in McAfee’s strategy.

MOVE will provide a platform in which McAfee and partners will be able to utilise to provide specifically designed security for virtualised environments. McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator platform will provide the user interface to configure and manage products developed on the MOVE platform. MOVE will facilitate VM tagging, so that regardless of the location within the virtualised environment or its context, continued security management will be possible with the ePolicy Orchestrator platform.

Other Benefits

The MOVE platform also is aiming to provide benefits such as a programming interface that is sound and secure, currently being tested and verified, allowing a common path and to develop to all of the major hypervisor vendors, a context aware platform, utilising enhanced virtualised infrastructure security capabilities from the individual hypervisor vendors when available increasing security and optimisation options when deployed in context specific environments, and an opportunity to enhance offerings with future API extensions as partnerships grow and new virtualisation models and features develop.

“McAfee MOVE will provide the platform for leveraging new and existing virtualised architectures to significantly reduce the overhead of protecting individual machines,” said George Kurtz, chief technology officer for McAfee. “Security within virtualised environments is one of our customers’ main concerns. We believe that enhancing the overall protection of these environments will lead to increased adoption of virtual machines with significant costs savings.”