October 14, 2010, 9:27 PM — McAfee Tuesday launched new endpoint security and management products intended to protect users in what's becoming an increasingly mobile world where workers are not tied to particular locations and may be using hand-held smartphones.
"Work is no longer a place, it's an activity," says Martin Ward, McAfee senior director of risk and compliance, adding further implications are that the IT infrastructure "is no longer in one place."
McAfee introduced Endpoint Security 9.0, with support for platforms ranging from Windows and Apple Macintosh as well as Android-based handhelds and the iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones .
Endpoint Security 9.0 combines antimalware and data-loss prevention with mobile device management. The software can be managed via McAfee's umbrella management console, ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO).
McAfee has also completed the first stage of integrating the enterprise mobility management software it gained in its http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/052510-mcafee-acquiring-trust-digi... ">acquisition of Trust Digital this year to allow the management software to work with McAfee ePO to poll devices for their status.
For instance, the enterprise mobility management software can now tell if the Apple iPhone 4.0 has "jailbreak" status, and it can selectively wipe data from the iPhone in a way that can preserve the user's personal data while erasing corporate data remotely.
According to McAfee, plans are to broaden the integration with ePO later next year to make ePO the primary management console for enterprise mobility management software since today ePO is working in tandem with the management console that was part of its Trust Digital acquisition earlier this year.
In another announcement, McAfee said it is now making available a version of its antivirus product optimized for virtualized desktop and server environment under the name McAfee for Management of Optimized Virtualized Environments.
Called MOVE A/V for short, the software resides on a hypervisor and uses a McAfee-developed technology to scan virtual-machine-based operating systems and applications. MOVE A/V works on the most recent versions of Citrix and VMWare-based virtualization software.
In addition, McAfee, which this week holds its FOCUS conference in Las Vegas with customers and vendor partners, announced an effort to broaden how the ePO management console can be used by adding a Web Services API in December under the name Security Management 5.0.
The goal of Security Management 5.0 and the new Web Services API is for vendor partners to "enable this to pull information from ePO," said Kevin LeBlanc, senior director of product marketing for endpoint security at McAfee. This would mean that other vendor management platforms could take information from ePO in order to make use of the information in those environments.
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