McAfee, Inc. Announces Strategy for Simplifying and Accelerating Security Management for Virtualized Environments

MARKHAM, ON – May 12, 2010 – McAfee, Inc. (NYSE:MFE) today announced its strategy to advance the security options for virtualized environments that will provide stronger and optimized security controls helping customer’s maximize their current and future investments in virtualization. McAfee is currently developing a platform and application programming interface to provide a framework that will accelerate and address the specific needs of security for virtualized environments.
Traditionally, security within the virtual machine or guest has proven to be inefficient and resource intensive, limiting the total number of virtual machines that can be deployed on a singular host. These challenges have jeopardized the long term operational expected savings that organizations have hoped to achieve with virtualization. Companies are deploying virtualization within their environments based on best fit and ease of management. There are limited choices for security, deploy traditional endpoint security within the virtual machine or utilize a hypervisor vendor’s proprietary API. Giving customers a way to unify security management across physical and virtual infrastructures has been a major driver in McAfee’s strategy.
The new platform, McAfee(R) Management for Optimized Virtual Environments (MOVE) platform, is designed to provide a common way to develop across the hypervisor vendors, offload resource intensive actions like security policy checking outside of the individual virtual machines and optimize scheduling of these actions based on the overall state of the hypervisor. McAfee plans to provide open source to its partners for security innovation, accelerating future virtual-adaptive offerings for the enterprise market. Utilizing the MOVE platform, McAfee intends to release A/V Offloading as its first product for customers.
“McAfee MOVE will provide the platform for leveraging new and existing virtualized architectures to significantly reduce the overhead of protecting individual machines,” said George Kurtz, chief technology officer for McAfee. “Security within virtualized environments is one of our customers’ main concerns. We believe that enhancing the overall protection of these environments will lead to increased adoption of virtual machines with significant costs savings.”
 
A Solution for Virtualized Security
McAfee MOVE will provide a platform in which McAfee and partners will be able to leverage to provide specifically designed security for virtualized environments. McAfee(R) ePolicy Orchestrator(R) platform will provide the user interface to configure and manage products developed on the MOVE platform. MOVE will facilitate VM tagging, so that regardless of the location within the virtualized environment or its context, continued security management will be possible with the ePolicy Orchestrator platform.
The MOVE platform also is expected to provide the following features and benefits:

  • Programming interface that is sound and secure being thoroughly tested and verified, allowing a common path and to develop to all of the major hypervisor vendors.
  • Context aware platform, leveraging enhanced virtualized infrastructure security capabilities from the individual hypervisor vendors when available increasing security and optimization options when deployed in context specific environments
  • Opportunity to enhance offerings with future API extensions as partnerships grow and new virtualization models and features develop.

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