McAfee Inc. unveils next-gen firewall solns

BANGALORE, INDIA: McAfee Inc., today announced that it has upgraded its enterprise firewall products with next generation capabilities that help customers increase network security and lower their compliance and operational costs in both physical and virtual network environments. 

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. 

Today, McAfee Firewall Enterprise protects more than 15,000 customers worldwide including thousands of government agencies, Fortune 500 organizations, and seven of the top ten financial institutions. By deploying these next generation capabilities, customers will lower ongoing management costs.

“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 Firewall Advancements

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 revolutionary new 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.