Outlook Series | McAfee Upgrades Firewall Solutions

McAfee Upgrades Firewall Solutions

June 10, 2009-

McAfee has upgraded its enterprise firewall products. The products, McAfee Firewall Enterprise (formerly Sidewinder), McAfee Firewall Enterprise Control Center and McAfee Firewall Enterprise Profiler also feature streamlined management through integration with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) software and leverage McAfee global threat intelligence to provide world class protection.

In recent years, organizations have faced the burden of dramatically increasing firewall management costs, as legacy technology has struggled to keep up with the volume of today’s threats and the changing application environments. Legacy firewalls depend on unwieldy technical rules that do not map to real business requirements and are too difficult for meeting audit, control and compliance requirements.

“Last generation firewalls are simply too hard and expensive to manage, and in reality, don’t effectively enforce relevant business policies,” said Dan Ryan, executive vice president and general manager of the Network Security business unit at McAfee. “Mobile users, modern Web-based applications and ever more sophisticated cyber criminals have combined with the economic environment to create the perfect storm. With this release, we’re delivering next generation firewall capabilities that improve network security while lowering compliance and operational costs in both physical and virtual network security environments.”

Next generation capabilities include significant advancements in firewall management, hybrid delivery options and integrated layers of threat protection. With the addition of McAfee Firewall Profiler, McAfee Firewall Enterprise is application and identity aware. McAfee Firewall Enterprise is the first and only firewall to use a global reputation-based technology, including TrustedSource reputation and geo-location to filter unwanted traffic before it hits the network—stopping attacks before they happen.

McAfee Firewall Profiler is a capability that pinpoints in real-time how firewalls rules and rule changes impact application availability, usage and security. Profiler turns hours and days of rule creation deployment and troubleshooting work into a matter of clicks by providing administrators visibility into the business impact of rule changes. By providing an intuitive visual context based on users and applications, Profiler reduces the impact of creating or changing specific rules and helps firewall administrators implement new policies and respond rapidly to business needs.

The revised version of Control Center and Firewall Reporter dramatically simplify management of multiple firewalls and enable more accurate audit and compliance reports. Both Profiler and Control Center now integrate with McAfee ePO software. Firewall Control Center now provides ePO software with firewall health data and reports for each firewall.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise is now available in traditional appliance form factors, in a new virtualized hardware appliance and as a software-based firewall virtual appliance. These new delivery options allow customers to take advantage of virtualization technologies to lower cost and increase flexibility when consolidating datacenter and application environments and when bringing up new virtual environments.

Features and Benefits

Advancements in Firewall Management - McAfee Firewall Profiler is an innovative new appliance. It addresses the number one challenge facing most firewall administrators, the need for business context around rules, by pinpointing how firewall rules are impacting the business application availability and security. Profiler delivers application and user context to firewall rules, instantly analyzes firewall and flow data from across the network and allows administrators to automatically understand the business impact of rule, application and network changes.
Virtual Technology Delivery Options - The new McAfee Firewall Enterprise 2150 VX appliances are 2U appliances that allow customers the ability to consolidate up to 32 firewalls into one physical appliance. The new McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance is an integrated software-only appliance that lets customers rapidly deploy protection into their own virtual environments on their own hardware. Both virtual technology delivery options support enterprise data center consolidation efforts. The 2150 VX models are also ideally suited to multi-tenant environments with their unique reporting and management requirements.
Integration with McAfee ePO software - McAfee Firewall Enterprise Control Center (CommandCenter™), used to manage multiple McAfee firewalls, now integrates with McAfee ePO, providing visibility into individual firewall health and status reports. Firewall Profiler is also integrated with McAfee ePO software, sending real-time prioritized alerts and overall context of event trends. By integrating with ePO software, the Firewall Enterprise product line now delivers Network security visibility to the ePO management console, further lowering management and compliance reporting costs for the overall organization.
Advance threat protection - McAfee Firewall Enterprise leverages McAfee’s global threat intelligence to deliver the world’s most advanced threat protection. McAfee TrustedSource™ reputation geo-location and reputation filtering allow organizations to limit their network connections to those with good reputations, coming from relevant locations. McAfee Antivirus protection, running on the firewall, leverages the global threat collection and analysis done by McAfee to deliver the most up-to-date protection against known bad code.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise appliances are available starting at $4,900 USD. Exact pricing depends on customer requirements, selected model and associated add-on modules. The McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance is priced at $4900 per VMWare ESX instance. McAfee Firewall Profiler appliance starts at $19,500 USD and Firewall Enterprise Control Center starts at $6,900 USD.