5 Things To Know About The New McAfee Endpoint And Cloud Tools

Here's a look at the data protection and endpoint detection and response capabilities partners and customers should be most excited about in McAfee's three newly launched products.

Taking MVision To The Next Level

The services businesses need to get the job done are increasingly living outside the organization's own environment, residing instead anywhere from a Software-as-a-Service application to the public cloud, according to Raja Patel, vice president and general manager of corporate products at McAfee.

To better tie together control points on the device and in the cloud, McAfee this summer launched the MVision product line with mobile, endpoint and ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) offerings to make the company's portfolio more simple, inclusive and comprehensive.

Now, three months later, the company is adding cloud and endpoint detection and response to the MVision portfolio, as well as an ePO-Unified Data Protection tool, Patel said.

"You're not compromising security, but you're taking a bunch of complexity out of the environment," Patel said leading up to the MPower 2018 Cybersecurity Summit in Las Vegas.

From partner opportunities to metrics for success, here are five key points Patel made about the new McAfee endpoint detection and response, cloud and data protection offerings.

5. Simplicity Is At The Heart Of The MVision Story

The MVision product line treats both devices and the cloud as control points, Patel said, and brings them together from an operational standpoint through management, threat intelligence, analytics, automation and orchestration.

The MVision portfolio was built to be simple so that organizations can consume it easily, Patel said, and is cloud-native and automatically up to date so they don't need to take on a project to upgrade it. As organizations move to Windows 10, Patel said they can either use the company's flagship, full-stack endpoint security (ENS) offering or leverage an optimized version managed through MVision ePO.

McAfee will continue to build out richness and capabilities across the entire picture under the MVision banner, Patel said. As time goes on, Patel said McAfee plans to bring to fruition some new capabilities focused around the management domain.

4. User-Centric Data Is Increasingly Going Under The Microscope

McAfee will use a mix of traditional and newer metrics to track the success of its new MVision products. From a management console perspective, Patel said McAfee will examine the total number of accounts as well as the growth in new accounts.

Meanwhile, McAfee will track the number of nodes enabled on the endpoint and client side, Patel said, and the number of nodes connected and users protected by its data management offering.

The debut of the MVision product line has coincided with the company moving from a node-centric to more of a user-based orientation, Patel said, meaning the number of users will be an important data point for the company going forward. In the big picture, Patel said McAfee is looking to measure the dollars and cents flowing into the business as well as which categories are driving the most growth.

3. MVision Cloud Is Both Something Old And Something New

MVision Cloud is derived from McAfee's acquisition of cloud access security broker Skyhigh Networks late last year, Patel said. Buying Skyhigh provided McAfee with a forward proxy, reverse proxy, and rich native integrations with APIs available inside larger cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, according to Patel.

Yet at the same time, Patel said the Skyhigh Networks platform has been enhanced by the more recent introduction of CASB Connect, which can be wrapped around applications moving to the public cloud so that security teams can deliver data protection in a more streamlined fashion.

In addition, Patel said McAfee has hooked Skyhigh Networks' capabilities together with the company's core endpoint and network security tools to provide more holistic protection.

2. EDR Is A Crowded Space, But McAfee Believes It Can Compete And Win

McAfee is entering the endpoint detection and response market at a time when the field is already packed with emerging vendors that were born in the space as well as legacy players such as Sophos that have built out EDR capabilities of their own.

But Patel believes McAfee can differentiate itself through integrations with its endpoint protection and security tools, which will allow for protection, detection and adoption to be more tightly aligned. The company's ability to deploy, manage and maintain in a scaled environment means that organizations can benefit from having a deeply integrated product that's more than just another tool or another management console.

"In the long game, I think EDR is just another feature of our overall security architecture," Patel said.

1. Partners Can Help With Everything From App Migration To Managing The Entire Service

A lot of customers are looking for experts to run security services on their behalf, Patel said, meaning there's an opportunity for partners to drive an MSSP-like or augmented Security Operations Center model around MVision EDR.

And as AWS and Microsoft Azure continue to grow, Patel said more organizations are looking to move their applications to the cloud. Partners can assist with this migration while keeping security front and center by taking advantage of capabilities available through MVision Cloud like CASB Connect.

More broadly, Patel said partners can play an integral role in helping customers modernize their architecture while ensuring security is baked in. Customers are turning to solution providers for help in figuring out how they should go about that journey in a systematic way, according to Patel.

"It's a great opportunity for the channel as a whole," Patel said.