6 Hot New Security Products Announced By McAfee This Week

Big McAfee Announcements

At its MPOWER event in Las Vegas this week, McAfee made the first significant products announcements across its portfolio since its blockbuster spinout from Intel six months earlier. The updates fit into a strategy of the newly-standalone security vendor to focus on advanced security controls for the endpoint and the cloud, as well as providing a framework for security operations. CTO Steve Grobman said this round of updates show McAfee's commitment to that vision, with new launches around security operations, endpoint, cloud and industry partnerships. Take a look at six things McAfee announced at its event this week.

McAfee Investigator

The new McAfee Investigator product is designed to provide SOC analyst teams with the context and information to spot and understand security events as they unfold, CTO Grobman said. While SOC teams are provided with massive amounts of data, turning that data into insights or actions can be a challenge without the proper context or analytics, he said. McAfee Investigator looks to fill that gap with a tool that "marries the human intellect of an incident responder with technology," Grobman said.

"We recognize that hiring well-skilled security professionals is a challenge," Grobman said. "We're trying to use technology to amplify the folks that do exist within a security organization so they can scale to a different level and degree."

The tool uses both machine learning and artificial intelligence to help the SOC analyst, leading to better threat prioritization, fast and through malware investigations, and increased SOC efficiency. The tool ties in with existing McAfee tools, including SIEM, as sources of data over which it overlays its analytics capabilities, he said.

McAfee Cloud Workload Security

As more organizations move to the cloud, they also realize that move comes with added security challenges. The new McAfee Cloud Workload Security offering looks to help companies manage elastic workloads, Grobman said. He said McAfee has "retooled" some of its core management capabilities for the cloud and can adapt as organizations move from on-premises to containers, to the public cloud, to virtual machines. The tool uses the McAfee ePolicy Orchestration console and automation to accomplish this, the company said.

Cisco Partnership

McAfee continues to expand its partnerships and integrations. The latest example of this is a partnership with rival Cisco, which brings together McAfee's Data Exchange Layer (DXL) with the Cisco Platform Exchange Grid (pxGrid). With interoperability between the two solutions, Grobman said partners and customers will now have a bridge between the two solutions, maximizing the value of both by allowing threat event context and automation across the network and endpoint security frameworks.

"The beauty in this approach is that it empowers the organizations to use whatever environments they feel most comfortable in, yet it also exposes all the features and capabilities that are available in both environments," Grobman said.

McAfee Web Gateway

Another advancement McAfee announced around the cloud is the move to run McAfee Web Gateway on Amazon Web Services. Grobman said the move to AWS provides additional capabilities to organizations as they move to hybrid environments, as well as increase scalability based on usage.

McAfee Advanced Threat Defense

McAfee also announced that McAfee Advanced Threat Defense, the company's sandbox solution, would now run on Microsoft Azure. In addition to the scalability benefits of the cloud, Grobman said partners would benefit from the move as it opens up more use cases for customers to provide value without the overhead of needing to operate in a data center.

McAfee Endpoint Security (ENS)

Finally, McAfee announced updates to its endpoint security capabilities. The company added further capabilities around machine learning, with new features around pre- and post-execution machine learning as well as decision making with deep learning. Grobman said the updates take the solution to the "next level" around machine learning and "improve our efficacy in those areas to a large degree."