McAfee Focuses on Data Center Security

As more organizations focus on the critical importance of the data center, the costs of providing that security are coming under more scrutiny. The simple truth is that most data centers today are protected by a hodgepodge of products and technologies that don’t readily share information about attacks with each other and often require a dedicated specialist to deploy and manage.

As a result, many IT organizations either wind up being frustrated by the expense associated with securing their data centers or they limit their investments to firewalls and anti-virus software in the hope that things will turn out for the best.

McAfee this week stepped into that void with the release of Data Center Security Suites, an offering designed to provide a comprehensive approach to securing servers, virtual machines, databases and even instances of virtual desktops running in the data center.

According to Deepak Thakkar, director of product marketing for McAfee, the goal is to unify the management of security across the data center in a way that not only enhances security, but also reduces costs. That approach is part of a concerted McAfee effort to create a defense-in-depth approach to data center security that includes all the benefits of a tightly integrated, layered security model, says Thakkar.

At a time when IT is under more pressure than ever to deliver new capabilities to the business, every dollar being invested in security technologies that don’t have an obvious return on investment comes under greater scrutiny. Every organization knows they need security; it’s just figuring out what level of security to invest in that can prove to be maddening.

The good news, notes Steve Durbin, global vice president of Information Security Forum Ltd., is that as larger security vendors move toward creating suites of products around specific functions, the more security technologies once exclusively associated with specific devices will get more broadly adopted. That’s important because despite the plethora of security options available, most IT organizations tend to limit security investments to products and technologies they are confident they know how to use. That may not be what every new provider of a security technology wants to hear, but nevertheless it is the current reality of enterprise security in most data centers today.