McAfee pushes support for ePO on entire line of IT offerings

by Steve Ragan - Jun 8 2009, 17:00

McAfee has announced several changes to its lineup of network security solutions aimed at IT. The changes include firewall offerings, IPS, Web and e-mail gateway products, and DLP solutions. The overall change comes from the ability to link any of McAfee’s products to its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) central management console.

Changing threat environments, growing economic concerns and the increasing cost of securing an enterprise are some of the listed reasons that IT has been forced to re-think how to best approach and manage network security.

“Today, customers are looking for ways to reduce the costs of both network security acquisition and ongoing operations. At the same time, the economic climate that is driving such changes is also creating accelerated threats and targeted attacks from organized cybercriminals,” McAfee said in a statement.

“Organizations must take a more unified approach to security,” added Chris Christiansen, vice president of Security Practice at IDC. “The days of managing network defense, Web and messaging security and data security as separate activities simply won’t succeed in today’s economic and threat environment.”

One of the newest initiatives comes from McAfee Total Protection for Internet Gateways (TPIG). The all-in-one bundle includes Web, e-mail and network DLP protection, as well as access to ePO support. The cost for TPIG is $50.00 USD per node for a 1,000-seat organization.

Moreover, McAfee has updated its offerings, thanks to the Secure Computing merger, to include support for ePO. McAfee Firewall Enterprise (formerly Sidewinder), McAfee Firewall Enterprise Control Center and McAfee Firewall Enterprise Profiler are all mentioned as being upgraded to support access to ePO.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise appliances are available starting at $4,900 USD. Exact pricing will depend on customer requirements, selected model and associated add-on modules. The McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance is priced at $4,900 USD per VMWare ESX instance. The McAfee Firewall Profiler appliance starts at $19,500 USD and Firewall Enterprise Control Center starts at $6,900 USD.

While it's good news to see McAfee tightly bind all of its various appliances and offerings together, leading to lower costs and better management, the rule of thumb should remain 'try before you buy'. Not all integrated solutions are created equal, and security is not as clear cut as simply tossing an appliance in a rack and walking away.

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The Tech Herald: And now? McAfee snatches Secure Computing for $465 million

 

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