McAfee Turns To Intel To Boost Cloud Security

The upgrade, introduced Monday, includes two modules developed by Intel, but rebranded for McAfee: the Intel Expressway Cloud Access 360 and the Expressway Service Gateway. "What the release this week really outlines is a total integrated platform where we're really highlighting some of the assets that we acquired through Intel, specifically around identity and identity management," Scott Chasin, chief technology officer for McAfee cloud security, said.

The integration is about McAfee extending security policies that exist behind the corporate firewall to a cloud environment, such as Salesforce.com. The data traffic that McAfee protects is Web, e-mail and authentication and identity, major issues for companies adopting cloud services.

The new modules in McAfee's platform include Cloud Identity Manager, a rebranding of Cloud Access 360. Manager extends single sign on from the enterprise to the cloud, Chasin says. "Nobody wants another password to manage to log into Salesforce." Identity Manager uses SAML, or security assertion markup language, as the XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data, so corporate employees can sign onto the company's network and also have access to cloud-based applications.

"That's a really big use case right now that every channel partner should be looking on," Chasin says. "How do we create an opportunity to solve single sign on with the enterprise and use that as the carrot to create all kinds of other value adds."

The Expressway Service Gateway, which has been rebranded the McAfee Services Gateway, has been integrated with McAfee's software console, ePolicy Orchestrator, for security and threat management of application-to-application data flows. Gateway extends to cloud services such features as policy controls, certification and encryption. ePO is also used to manage identity and authentication across the cloud.

The new McAfee-branded modules are being sold through the security vendor and its channel partners, Chasin says. The latter have the opportunity of selling technology that matches what companies are looking for when heading to the cloud. "There's a lot of green out there," Chasin says of the opportunity for VARs.

Other enhancements to the Cloud Security Platform include an upgrade of McAfee Data Loss Prevention to cover virtual machines running servers in the cloud and within the corporate network. DLP in general enables IT to see the data flowing from applications and apply policies for its use. In addition, McAfee has released an update to Email Gateway to provide more advanced encryption, such as the ability to view encrypted messages from mobile devices.

The modular nature of McAfee's platform enables channel partners to build customers' cloud environments piece by piece. In general, large companies favor hybrid environments, while smaller companies move closer to a pure software-as-a-service option.