McAfee's new enterprise products - #69

Early next year McAfee plans to partner with Cisco Systems to deliver an offering dubbed Policy Enforcer which will work with the McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator and Cisco switching technology to act as a network-edge sentinel that allows access only to clients that meet security policy criteria. The system will scan PCs and wireless devices and apply security assessment technology from Foundstone, which McAfee acquired last year, to determine if a device meets security policy. Once a client device has been scanned, Policy Enforcer will quarantine the device in a secure subnetwork using a McAfee IntruShield VLAN, or the system will move the device to a remediation network that instructs the user how to cleanse the device to an acceptable level.

Also in the works is the McAfee Content Security Appliance, currently in beta and scheduled to ship in the third quarter of 2005, the appliance will provide Web and e-mail security plus prevent spyware at the network edge. As many as three versions are planned. One, a secure Internet gateway with integrated content security, will include antivirus, antispam, content/URL filtering and anti-phishing capabilities. The other two appliances, a secure Web gateway and a secure messaging gateway, address more specific Web and e-mail security. Apparently these appliances will be faster than the current hot box from Fortinet.

In addition, McAfee is slated to introduce Intrushield NG, a unified threat-management product. Due for release next spring, Intrushield NG will be a carrier-grade appliance with throughput of up to 12Gbps in its first iteration, scalable to 100Gbps. Plans call for IntruShield NG to initially offer intrusion prevention, firewall, network antivirus and antispyware functions, but later iterations could include URL filtering, content filtering, network firewall and VPN capabilities and be fast enough to sit on a service provider back end.