Compliance through unified policy auditing from McAfee

McAfee announced its new Total Protection for Compliance solution which combines the power of the McAfee Vulnerability Manager appliance and the McAfee Policy Auditor software with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) software to create a single platform for deployment, management, risk analysis, and compliance reporting. This solution also includes a new capability for correlating the latest threats with vulnerabilities, asset values and existing security protection.

McAfee extends risk management through awareness of countermeasures, which increases the value of security protection. Until now, administrators received threat advisory information without any context; they had to determine the threat impact on their particular environment. Now, McAfee correlates threat information with the unique vulnerabilities, asset values, and existing protection measures of each user. By adding more intelligence into protection, McAfee provides security personnel with a customized threat intelligence perspective on their particular environments.

McAfee integration through ePO results in improved metrics and communications about where vulnerabilities exist and which systems need priority attention. Many security intelligence services only deliver generic information on threat advisories, but McAfee goes beyond to specify how existing efforts to protect assets mitigate risk. Using McAfee’s countermeasure-aware risk management application, new threats and vulnerabilities are evaluated against the deployment of anti-virus, buffer overflow, and intrusion prevention solutions. Assets that have these countermeasures are at less risk and allow administrators to allocate remediation efforts toward areas of highest criticality.

For example, when assessing a threat event, McAfee’s technology allows IT administrators to identify and focus on only the vulnerable systems and not those that have acceptable levels of protection. This provides immediate insight, saves critical time, and dramatically improves security. When IT is empowered by this information, it can often mean the difference between worrying about 30 systems instead of 3,000.