McAfee, Inc. Pioneers New Standard for Protecting Virtualized Environments

McAfee Inc. (NYSE: MFE) today delivered a pioneering secure virtualization solution, McAfee(R) Total Protection for Virtualization. The new solution extends security across virtual and physical environments and sets a new standard for securing virtualized infrastructures.

Virtualization gives organizations the ability to consolidate servers to share physical resources including processors, memory, and disk space. Companies are quickly adopting virtualization to reduce hardware costs, improve manageability, increase application resiliency and simplify deployment. McAfee provides customized protection for virtual environments, including online and offline virtual machines to help enterprises safely benefit from the full potential of virtualization.

"Over the next five years, more than half of server workloads will be virtualized, but awareness of server virtualization risks remains low," said Gartner Fellow and Vice President, Neil MacDonald. "Security must be incorporated into virtual systems from their inception -- not addressed later as an afterthought."

McAfee is among the first to offer a complete and, scalable security solution available, spanning physical and virtual servers, desktops and networks. Optimized for the VMware platform, McAfee Total Protection for Virtualization delivers:

• Stronger Protection -- comprehensive, layered protection for all virtual machines against malware, rootkits, spyware, bots, spam, zero-day threats, vulnerabilities, data loss, data exposure, and more
• Lower Costs -- single management console and automatic updates that reduce time and resources required for secure virtualization management, resulting in improved operational efficiencies
• Simplified Compliance -- automated compliance reports and integration with McAfee and third-party compliance tools to enable better compliance for virtual environments

"Customers recognize the inherent scalability, flexibility and cost effectiveness of virtualization and are rapidly increasing the number of virtualized enterprise applications," said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of alliances at VMware. "By combining superior VMware hypervisor security with tools from partners like McAfee that leverage virtual machine resource and network visibility through our VMsafe APIs, customers can run applications in a more secure virtualized environment. Together, VMware's industry-leading management and virtualization suite, VMware Infrastructure, and McAfee's Total Protection for Virtualization provide customers with the tools they need for end-to-end security of their virtualized environments."

McAfee Total Protection for Virtualization is a comprehensive virtualized server security suite that includes the following core components:

• McAfee VirusScan Enterprise and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise for Linux -- continuous on-access scanning for superior protection from viruses, worms, and other malicious code
• McAfee VirusScan Enterprise for Offline Virtual Images -- unique security solution that scans, cleans, and updates offline virtual machines without bringing them online
• McAfee Anti-spyware Enterprise -- unique on-access scanning to identify, proactively block, and safely eliminate spyware and other potentially unwanted programs
• McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention for server -- combines signature and behavioral IPS protection, stateful firewall, and application control to stop known and zero-day attacks.
• McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator(R) -- centralized management console, the only integrated security and risk management platform for both physical and virtual environments.

Total Protection for Virtualization will be available in Q4. Pricing is per physical server host, and covers all virtual machines deployed on that server.

McAfee, Inc., headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is the world's largest dedicated security technology company. It delivers proactive and proven solutions and services that secure systems and networks around the world, allowing users to browse and shop the Web securely. With its unmatched security expertise and commitment to innovation, McAfee empowers home users, businesses, the public sector and service providers by enabling them to comply with regulations, protect data, prevent disruptions, identify vulnerabilities and continuously monitor and improve their security.

Source: McAfee