MOUNTAIN VIEW, Ca. – McAfee has tied its next generation of firewall products into its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) management software. The security vendor has also opened up ePO to integrate third-party partners’ products into the management frame.
McAfee Firewall Enterprise (formerly Sidewinder), McAfee Firewall Enterprise Control Center and McAfee Firewall Enterprise Profiler were designed to be more easily managed from ePO, and according to McAfee, older generations of firewalls are too difficult and expensive to manage. By tying firewall software into ePO, the idea is make it easier and more cost-effective to manage it.
Now that the firewall products are integrated into the ePO management software, IT administrators can get reporting, status and monitoring of firewalls through a single pane of glass, said Greg Brown, senior director of product marketing for network defense at McAfee.
“That’s the proof point of the technology we acquired with the Secure Computing acquisition,” he said.
Firewall Profiler offers management capabilities for firewalls that solve real problems customers are having today, Brown said. It offers more visibility into what users are doing with resources and assets in the network environment than conventional firewall technologies. It can also match user behavior and access to business policies so that administrators can get highlights of what users are doing — and if they’re doing anything different from others in their departments.
The Firewall Enterprise 2150 VX is a 2U appliance that enables customers to consolidate up to 32 firewalls into a single physical appliance. With the new McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance, customers can quickly deploy their own virtual environments on their hardware. Brown noted the appliance is ideal for datacenter virtualization and consolidation, as well as multi-tenant environments and the up-and-coming software-as-a-service (SaaS) market.
Firewall Enterprise Control Center used to manage multiple firewalls, but now that it has been integrated with ePO, it provides visibility into the health and status of individual firewalls.
All of the products were designed to reduce acquisition and management costs while increasing flexibility, Brown said.
McAfee Firewall Enterprise appliances are available today, starting at $4,900 (US). The McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance is priced at $4,900 per VMWare ESX instance. McAfee Firewall Profiler appliance starts at $19,500 and Firewall Enterprise Control Center starts at $6,900.
McAfee also announced the Total Protection for Internet Gateways bundle, which offers customers three security elements for about the price of one.
“It’s actually a suite of products. You get Web security, e-mail security and network loss prevention in one package,” Brown said.
He noted that the acquisition price for the bundle is about the same as the price for one of the individual technologies.
“We cover that entire range of solutions with one low price point,” he said.
Additionally, all three products integrate with ePO.
“The big message there is we believe that customers want to optimize the way they manage security in their environments. We believe that’s causing an environment of consolidation,” Brown said.
For the channel, the bundle and new products represent an up-sell opportunity, but the message for partners to take to their customers is in the deployment of security as part of a much bigger framework (the ePO framework), he said.
“The great thing about it with our channel is they’re used to selling around the integration of ePolicy Orchestrator, so they have this customer base that has already become familiar with the interface and familiar with it from a systems mangement perspective,” Brown said.
This column was written by Chris Talbot of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany
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