McAfee Weaves Cisco NAC Into Total Protection

McAfee Monday unveiled a revamped version of its Total Protection Enterprise offering that includes a range of security improvements and support for Cisco's network admission control (NAC) technology.

Total Protection Enterprise, which McAfee launched in April, bundles the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor's antivirus, antispyware, antispam and intrusion prevention products and makes them accessible through its ePolicy Orchestrator management console. Total Protection Enterprise Advanced edition adds McAfee's Policy Enforcer network access control (NAC) software.

In the spruced up Total Protection Enterprise release, McAfee has integrated Policy Enforcer with the Cisco NAC framework, the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant's vision for developing a standardized way of deploying NAC with the cooperation of software industry partners, including Microsoft.

Integrating Cisco NAC with Total Protection makes it possible for administrators to define policies, assess compliance and perform remediation using McAfee software, while letting Cisco infrastructure handle the device detection and policy enforcement tasks of NAC, said Dave Dickison, senior vice president of North American channels at McAfee.

McAfee also has upgraded the malware detection features of Total Protection Enterprise, adding behavioral analysis -- which enables faster detection -- to more effectively protect PCs from unknown threats as well as rootkits, Dickison added.SiteAdvisor, a browser based security tool that includes safety ratings along with search engine results to warn users away from websites associated with malware distribution, has been wrapped into Total Protection and can also be managed through ePO, said Dickison.

Steven Nacci, regional account manager at TLIC Worldwide, a solution provider in Wakefield, R.I., says the enhanced version of Total Protection fits with McAfee's goal of leveraging its information management capabilities to get deeper into the enterprise.

These abilities were boosted by McAfee's October acquisitions of vulnerability remediation vendor Citadel Software and data leak prevention vendor Onigma. These technologies fit into McAfee's earlier Foundstone and Preventsys acquisitions to form the basis of the vendor's budding security risk management portfolio.

Adding to the value of Total Protection is the fact that ePO's reporting features are growing more sophisticated and versatile, which helps convey the value of security solutions to non-technical people, added Nacci.

"ePO is definitely a superior reporting tool, and the more McAfee can utilize it the happier customers will be," he said.0