McAfee is making a major play for the network security market with a unified security suite offering an improved firewall technology that it hopes will make it an even competitor with Symantec and Cisco.
The company’s Network Security Business Unit (NSBU) is looking to double its revenues to $1B per year by offering a complete network security software package with new management tools that it feels will cut operating security costs by better management.
“Our plan is to consolidate a full selection of network security products,” said Dan Ryan, executive vice president of NSBU, and former chief executive of Secure Computing. “It’s unique to the industry.”
The consolidation of the security industry over the last ten years has seen single service providers swallowed up into more unified security offerings, he said. By offering a single point solution, McAfee was both mirroring current trends in the industry and taking them forward for network managers.
Key to the strategy is simplifying management by IT administrators. This approach is shown in McAfee’s new firewall product and management suite, which uses a new graphical user interface to simplify the setting of firewall rules and policies using Firewall Enterprise Profiler.
“Previously [firewall rules] were something that took days to organize, or you blew a hole through your firewall,” said Greg Brown, senior director of McAfee product marketing. “We were finding 5-10,000 firewalls in place in a typical installation, so that needed to be simplified.”
The new firewalls use graphical tools to set up access conditions for desktops, laptops and mobile devices and allow IT administrators to be alerted should conditions change. In this way the company says it vastly reduces the amount of time and expertise to set up a firewall system.
Additional elements to the unified offering will be released over the next six months and McAfee is making a serious…