As part of its Focus 12 security conference, McAfee has rolled out a new reference architecture to simplify and extend security monitoring, management and remediation.

The Security Connected Platform, currently under development but unveiled Wednesday by McAfee CTO Mike Fey, is essentially an attempt to develop a better understanding of what is happening on the network in real time, as well as from an historical perspective.

"Security is like a maze," Fey told the gathering at this week's event in Las Vegas. "The attacker comes in and looks for the cheese, based on discovering which attempts fail to work."

[Related: McAfee Focus: New Enhancements To Support Endpoint Security, Asset Discovery, Multifunction Devices]

Often leveraging automated systems, the attackers keep trying until they penetrate. But, added granularity about real-time traffic can go a long way towards effective defense.

The company is leveraging partnerships with a wide variety of different companies, in an effort to create an "open environment" to augment security in order to better identify the threats, develop effective remediation and extend into the widest possible breadth of security technologies.

Capabilities to be delivered through the reference architecture are expected to include various analytics, scan avoidance, countermeasures and gray listing. Many of the parameters will be determined locally. "If we tried to do that on a global level, we would generate a lot of false positives," Fey explained. "But you can make those decisions locally based on your own particular set of circumstances."

The multivendor aspect that enables the platform to work with a wider variety of systems is expected to be a huge benefit to the channel.

"Being able to drill down into actual events involving several platforms is going to make a huge difference," said Tim Thimons, director of engineering at 4 Star Technologies, a Herndon, Va., partner. "This will be a great asset to a wide variety of customers, but we expect our federal customers will be especially interested."

McAfee hopes to parlay this offering into increased awareness of the breadth of their product portfolio.

"We want to be the glue that holds all of this together," said company co-president Mike DeCesare. "If we end up in a different competitive situation, [and lose some deals to competing vendors], then shame on us for not having the No. 1 product in that space. The bad guys get through the slightest crack in the door, and we all need to work together to defend against that."

PUBLISHED OCT. 25, 2012