Spotlight

McAfee’s proactive security model

The company’s new enterprise security solutions approach is all about integrating anti-virus, firewall and intrusion prevention, says Chitra Padmanabhan

“With a change in name from Network Associates to McAfee we will be concentrating purely on providing security products and solutions,” says Kartik Shahani, sales director for India at McAfee Security. This simple statement sums up McAfee’s ongoing transformation wherein it is positioning itself as a pure security company. Though the management has been contemplating this move for quite some time, the strategy gained momentum after the company announced its new moniker and renewed business strategy. Network Associates changed its name to McAfee as there was a higher brand recall for that name.

McAfee is also trying to focus on integrated security concepts which sport proactive security features as opposed to conventional reactive security. The company’s new enterprise security solutions approach is all about integrating anti-virus, firewall and intrusion prevention. The company believes that existing products are not effective as they are reactive.

Says Kartik Shahani, Sales Director - India, McAfee, “For McAfee, our biggest achievement has been the integration of our offerings to form an end-to-end IPS system. In the last year, we have launched more new products than ever before and have upgraded all our existing solutions.”

For instance, the company recently launched McAfee IntruShield 2.1, which is based on IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) technology that offers network-based encrypted threat protection with an integrated firewall. The product provides for decryption and inspection of SSL-encrypted traffic, while maintaining the integrity of encrypted data and encryption keys. Another product, McAfee Entercept 5.0, is a host IPS solution that acts as an added layer between the system and the network. This product supposedly offers protection against zero-day attacks.

Content filtering

Like other security companies in India, McAfee has been quick to spot the demand for content filtering and anti-spam solutions. With this goal in mind, the company recently launched McAfee WebShield and SpamKiller 3000 Series Appliances to tap the content management market. The solutions integrate with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) providing IT administrators with graphical reporting on key virus activity at the gateway and let them apply different rules for anti-virus, anti-spam and content filtering. The company has also incorporated anti-phishing rules into its monthly rule engine updates to protect customers from phishing attacks.

When triggered, the rules target phishing-specific characteristics and e-mail messages are assigned a spam score that helps identify phishing scams at the gateway and aid in overall anti-spam efforts. McAfee SpamKiller provides both reactive and proactive spam detection techniques which, when combined with increased incremental updates to the rule sets, offer the most up-to-date protection. Shahani believes that companies are looking at slashing costs through integrated appliances, and this is where the company’s expertise in security can help.

For SMEs

The company’s products did not scale up readily in the past. All that changed in 2003, when the company began targeting small and medium companies with its ASaP technology. Shahani says that the ASaP service has taken off very well in the Indian market, with a host of clients from the small business segment signing up for it. SecureSynergy is the ASaP-managed services hosting partner for McAfee Security. The company is currently establishing tie-ups with resellers in the country who offer IT support to small businesses through AMCs. The reseller can buy licenses for ASaP on behalf of his customers, and he no longer has to send a support technician to the client’s workplace every time a security update is needed. ASaP is an online anti-virus managed service that is provided by McAfee. It uses Rumor, a technology built around a peer-to-peer distribution model for upgrading anti-virus patches. Hence if even one desktop downloads the update, it becomes the distribution agent and distributes the patch to others on the network, thereby decreasing the load on external bandwidth links. This concept has proved to be extremely successful in the SME segment as unlike business applications, security software should be updated at least once a week and more often when a new virus breaks out. In such cases, managing and updating security policies and applications can prove to be more costly than the software itself.

“Organisations do not find it feasible to deploy an IT administrator at each branch office. Some may have very few employees, so they are increasingly deploying solutions meant for the SMB segment,” says Shahani. Currently McAfee has Ingram Micro as its national distributor. It also has tier I partners such as HCL Comnet, HCL Infosys, CMC, Datacraft and Secure Synergy, 45 regional partners and 300 resellers. The company has also put across an intensive partner training program which includes a certification program and e-learning courses. The fact that India is emerging as an important destination can also be seen from the decision of McAfee to announce that it would establish its third largest research base, the Anti Virus Emergency Response Team or AVERT in Bangalore.

chitra@expresscomputeronline.com