McAfee to acquire SIEM vendor NitroSecurity

by Steve Ragan - Oct 4 2011, 14:16

McAfee is in a buying mood again. This time it has snatched up security information and event management (SIEM) vendor NitroSecurity, with the intention of merging the NitroView family of products into the ePolicy Orchestrator suite. This, just weeks after another security vendor with a horse in the race, declared SIEM dead.

The announcement of McAfee’s purchase wasn’t forthcoming with information regarding the actual purchase price. However, McAfee did make its plans clear where Nitro’s technology is concerned.

“Following the completion of this proposed acquisition, McAfee expects that NitroSecurity's technology... will give organizations greater visibility into their enterprise endpoint assets, underlying network infrastructure, specific security threats and risks and system vulnerabilities across their entire IT environment,” a press release outlined.

The idea that security giant McAfee just purchased a SIEM vendor, seems to show the opposite of a prediction made last month by eIQnetworks, which offers compliance automation, configuration auditing and forensic analysis, and real-time continuous security monitoring in a single product.

Last month, John Linkous, chief security and compliance officer at eIQnetworks, said that SIEM was dead. Yet, the company includes the basics of SIEM in its own product... so there is some worth in the technology and its place on the network?

“Just as signature-based technologies long ago stopped being the only effective line of defense for enterprise and government networks, the SIEM approach of relying entirely on logs and other event-based information to effectively address modern enterprise threats is now dead, as well,” said Linkous.

McAfee, as well as other security professionals, seems to think there is something there. SIEM is only one part of the puzzle, which is why eIQnetworks includes such features in its own product, and why McAfee purchased a company with the tools already in place instead of developing its own product from scratch.

Prior to the purchase, Nitro was named a leader in the famed Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM. After the ink is dry on all the paperwork, the NitroSecurity team will be incorporated into the McAfee Risk and Compliance business unit.

The deal is expected to be complete by the close of 2011's fourth quarter.

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