McAfee, Inc., today unveiled its “Security Connected” initiative, enabling partners, developers and customers to apply a more intelligent, effective and sustainable approach to securing digital information. As part of its Security Connected initiative, McAfee is announcing the first two of four new connected security platforms, McAfee Endpoint Security 9 and McAfee Security Management 5.

With threats sharply on the rise in both quantity and complexity, an uncertain economic environment, and an insatiable desire to deploy new, more competitive computing models, IT organizations can no longer sustain the traditional model of tacking on new security products for every new threat. By connecting mobile with endpoint security, network security, content security, and the cloud, McAfee is coordinating security defenses to enable businesses to be more agile. McAfee offers organizations correlated and comprehensive intelligence which in turn dramatically reduces risk, enhances their security posture, helps meet compliance regulations, and drives up operational efficiencies.

Security too often is being driven from different silos within businesses - from mobile devices, PCs, and tablets, to mission-critical networks, servers, hosted applications, cloud services, virtual machines, and databases - bringing dozens or hundreds of different security technologies and disparate management paradigms with them. More often than not, there is no correlation or integration making security very expensive, inflexible and ineffective to manage and maintain. Today, businesses require more than just security technologies, they need integrated intelligent security that provides a global view of threats, vulnerabilities, and the countermeasures to address them. Businesses are moving from securing components to understanding and measuring the security of a business as a whole.

“The IT landscape is rapidly changing,” said Chris Christiansen, vice president, security products and services at IDC. “Virtualization of servers and endpoints, shifting of data and services to the cloud, and the consumerization of IT is creating new holes in previously protected systems and networks. This is a fundamental shift from even just a few years ago when the bifurcation points between business and personal, outside and inside, and us and them was more visible.”

Enabling Businesses Through Security

By taking a connected approach, McAfee is moving security from a perceived business inhibitor to a true business enabler. Applying “Security Connected” principles and vision, IT professionals can more confidently say “yes” to new applications and approaches.

McAfee Security Connected components include:

• Proactive security through built-in integration and intelligence
• Global Threat Intelligence: Unmatched threat research and content capability to deliver predictive threat analysis, reputational scoring, cloud delivery and intelligence in depth to power connected security technologies.
• Broad portfolio of countermeasures: Integrated security for PCs, Mac, smartphones, tablets, storage, embedded, silicon, network perimeter, datacenter, web gateways, mail security, content, and so on with a choice of on premise, SaaS, or hybrid delivery models.
• Intelligent Security Management Platform: Integrating disparate solutions and extending beyond a simple reporting dashboard to a rational, informed, scalable and situationally aware security management interface
• Predictive security solutions that can proactively find and protect against vulnerabilities, target and predict threats based on policies and events
• Partner Ecosystem: Delivering services through an open ecosystem of partners to ensure customers can take full advantage of the latest technology from both McAfee and our extensive list of ecosystem partners.
• McAfee Connected: program is aimed at helping partners worldwide ensure product and service compatibility with McAfee solutions. The program’s testing process ensures that the third-party hardware, software and services that customers choose perform well, and are compatible with, McAfee technology.

“Disjointed point products simply don’t work for today’s businesses,” said George Kurtz, chief technology officer, McAfee, Inc. “Security is now mission-critical and strategic to the business. It needs to be connected and correlated, with shared intelligence, and centrally managed. Products still need to be best-of-breed, without trading off quality, and IT needs to be empowered to say ‘yes’ to data and applications, at any time, on any device, from any location.”

McAfee believes that the changes in business today will require the move from simply securing components, to understanding and measuring security more holistically. Security needs have morphed and now require a more connected approach. To address this requirement, McAfee has introduced two new platform offerings to advance its “Security Connected” vision and initiative: McAfee Endpoint Security 9 and McAfee Security Management 5.

McAfee Endpoint Security 9

Provides protection anywhere, anytime on any device including desktops, servers, virtual machines, mobile devices and embedded systems. With its new integrated Endpoint Security platform, McAfee now delivers “Security Connected” for the full range of traditional and emerging endpoints to help organizations keep up with the increasingly complex IT environment.

McAfee Security Management 5

A new comprehensive centralized management platform that delivers proactive risk management, integration with business operations, and coordinated security defenses. It provides a full risk profile across multiple security layers, vendors, products and solutions resulting in a dramatically enhanced security posture, lower operational costs and a “Security Connected” approach to understanding the threat landscape and managing business risk.

To learn more about McAfee Security Connected, visit www.mcafee.com/securityconnected.