McAfee boosts firewall

By Staff Writer for Trellix

Johannesburg, 06 Jul 2009

McAfee has upgraded its enterprise firewall products with next-generation capabilities to improve network security and reduce compliance and operational costs.

Jayson O'Reilly, regional manager for McAfee Africa, says: " "Last generation firewalls are simply too hard and expensive to manage and, in reality, don't effectively enforce relevant business policies.

“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 security

McAfee Firewall Enterprise uses reputation-based technology called TrustedSource and geo-location to limit network connections and filter unwanted traffic before it hits the network. This effectively stops attacks before they happen.

In an effort to strengthen security capabilities, the company has integrated McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) into its security suite of products branded McAfee Firewall Enterprise (formerly known as Sidewinder). ePO provides visibility into the health of the firewall as well as providing security compliance reports.

In addition, the company has integrated Firewall Profiler into the McAfee Firewall Enterprise. The software pinpoints in real-time how firewalls rules and rule changes impact application availability, usage and security. Profiler helps firewall administrators implement new policies and respond rapidly to business needs.

McAfee says its Firewall Enterprise is now available in a virtualised hardware appliance and as a software-based firewall virtual appliance. According to McAfee, virtualisation technologies lower cost and increases flexibility when consolidating data centre and application environments and when bringing up new virtual environments.