McAfee today announced the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator 4 (ePO), a single console for management of security applications and services. The company also announced the Security Innovation Alliance, which will provide a set of tools designed to help integrate third-party applications into ePO.
McAfee is claiming a lot of firsts for ePO, which it updated to support security and compliance products from multiple vendors.
The company says the product is the first to deliver single agent and single console for endpoint security, the first of its kind to manage a broad range of security products, both McAfee and non-McAfee, and the first to combine security and compliance management through one console.
“We really see this as the most significant product upgrade in McAfee’s history for our enterprise product environment,” Kevin LeBlanc, group product marketing manager in McAfee’s Total Protection & Data Loss Prevention unit, told InternetNews.com. “It offers a single management console for all the platforms we support, and its function is to evaluate all the risks of the business and assign business value to the assets.”
ePO, which will be available Sept. 25, supports desktop security products, gateways, server filters and compliance software for meeting Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory compliance all into one management console.
McAfee sees compliance and security as falling into the same overarching category. “Regulatory compliance and data security are essentially one in the same and both are vital to maintaining your business,” said LeBlanc.
By combining all security administration into a single console, McAfee estimates a cost savings in operations of up to 62 versus non-ePO customers. ePO customers needed 44 percent fewer administrators to manage their environments and 37 percent less time to manage their networks.
McAfee, which runs its own malware research group called Avert Labs, estimates that cyber crime in 2006 reached $105 billion in losses around the world. LeBlanc said that in the most recent quarter, McAfee saw more variants of malware samples than it did in all of 2005 and 2006 combined. Even though home users are the overwhelming targets, enterprises are also targeted.
“We’re still seeing a vast amount of damage being done at the enterprise level,” he said. While most of it is aimed at individuals, “Think how many Social Security numbers are on file at a Fortune 1000 company. Cybercrime groups aren’t just targeting individuals but enterprises, even though they have the traditional protections in place, and are still being penetrated.”
