As part of its commitment to provide unparalleled protection to businesses and governments, McAfee Inc. announced the release of McAfee® ePolicy Orchestrator® (ePO™) 4.5 software to help secure organizations from a vast and ever-growing threat landscape.

McAfee Avert Labs data shows that attacks on digital information increased 500% over the previous year. According to industry research, a large enterprise network can have as many as 200 different security providers. This creates significant cost and complexity and delivers suboptimal protection, since these tools generally cannot share information, coordinate threat intelligence feeds, or correlate security events. To address these challenges, leading organizations are turning to integrated offerings to achieve an improved security posture while at the same time lowering costs.

To achieve optimized security architecture, characterized by the highest possible protection levels and the lowest possible risk and cost, organizations must consider four primary elements:

1. Integrated defense across systems and networks to deliver best in class layered protection in a coordinated, correlated fashion across multiple required countermeasures and security sensors.
2. Automated compliance tightly integrated with the greater security ecosystem to empower the enterprise to achieve and sustain compliance through a risk-based approach and to remove the difficulty in meeting mandated deadlines for the ever-growing list of compliance regulations.
3. Real-time threat intelligence that delivers in-the-cloud detection and distribution capabilities, coverage for all five primary threat vectors, reputational analysis, visibility across the entire internet, and a dedicated team of security research experts.
4. An open security management platform that provides a singular management console, integration capabilities with multi-vendor environments, and complete visibility into the end-to-end security landscape.

McAfee ePO 4.5 software helps satisfy these four elements as the first and only security management platform to centrally manage network, system, data, and compliance solutions kept informed in real-time by McAfee’s Global Threat Intelligence technologies (including Artemis and TrustedSource). This latest ePO software release improves scalability, features a new Web-based management interface, and offers a new workflow and automation framework to further streamline security operations.

ePO’s configurable dashboards enable users to monitor their security infrastructure at a glance.

Customer perspective
“McAfee understands the importance of holistic, continual optimization and is demonstrating this with its framework and ePolicy Orchestrator open security management platform,” said Norm Fjeldheim, CIO of Qualcomm. “We continually refine our approach to security, so it is critical that we work with strategic partners that understand our needs and offer the breadth of products that McAfee does. They have helped us automate many common security tasks, which allows for increased efficiencies in managing security.”

“McAfee is the only company that can provide both leading edge network security and system security to protect us from threats at every angle,” said Richard LaBella, manager corporate IT security, of Citrix Systems. “We’re excited about the powerful new automation framework in McAfee ePO 4.5 that will streamline workflows for improvements in operational efficiencies.”

McAfee ePO 4.5 highlights
McAfee ePO software is the industry’s most scalable security management platform, allowing organizations of all sizes to manage, from a single server, dozens of devices up to hundreds of thousands of devices. McAfee ePO 4.5 software includes enhancements in the following areas:

• Improved enterprise scalability with a new multi-tiered architecture that features load balancing, failover support, and multiple server awareness for improved policy management and reporting.
• Enhanced Web-based, customizable interface with streamlined navigation and reporting enhancements to provide immediate visibility into the organization’s security posture. The enhanced interface is more intuitive and more powerful in delivering end-to-end visibility across the organization’s entire security environment.
• Improved workflow and automation framework to help minimize vulnerabilities and save administrator time in completing common tasks. This framework can utilize the ePO software’s advanced tagging capability to automatically add protection to discovered systems. Administrators can also develop security policies to automate protection based on user profiles rather than merely by system or device (this is especially important for encryption and/or URL filtering capabilities). In addition, new help desk ticketing integration with HP OpenView and BMC Remedy automate workflow tasks and make security a transparent part of IT operations.

“IT organizations want to consolidate and standardize on a strategic security partner to deliver the highest protection levels while driving down cost,” said Matt Fairbanks, senior vice president of product and solution marketing at McAfee. “With McAfee’s unmatched network and systems security portfolio, powerful compliance technologies, real-time Global Threat Intelligence, and a security management platform based on ePolicy Orchestrator, McAfee is transforming the way businesses approach security.”

Click here for more information on McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator or how McAfee solutions help deliver an optimized security architecture.

About McAfee, Inc.
McAfee, Inc., headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is the world's largest dedicated security technology company. McAfee is committed to relentlessly tackling the world's toughest security challenges. The company delivers proactive and proven solutions and services that help secure systems and networks around the world, allowing users to safely connect to the Internet, browse and shop the web more securely. Backed by an award-winning research team, McAfee creates innovative products that empower home users, businesses, the public sector and service providers by enabling them to prove compliance with regulations, protect data, prevent disruptions, identify vulnerabilities, and continuously monitor and improve their security.

NOTE: McAfee and any additional McAfee marks herein are registered trademarks of McAfee, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and/or other countries. McAfee Red in connection with security is distinctive of McAfee brand products. All other registered and unregistered trademarks herein are the sole property of their respective owners. Product specifications subject to change at any time without prior notice. © 2009 McAfee, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Video: Introduction to ePO 4.5

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