Focus11: Intel Announces Collaboration Program with McAfee

McAfee’s parent company, Intel, is set to work on five areas of collaboration with the security vendor over the next five years, including securing mobile devices and improved Cloud security.

Speaking at Focus11 in Las Vegas, Intel business clients solutions and enabling director, Lisa Watts, said that the creation of the program was influenced by changing trends in the threat landscape.

“There are three trends that have emerged,” she said. “The first is malware. According to McAfee statistics, it is seeing 66,000 pieces of new malware every day, up from 22,000 per day in 2010.”

Connectivity across devices and the security threat that this poses, such as interception of data from unsecured smartphones, along with keeping data stored in a public Cloud environment safe were the other two trends.

The first area of collaboration was the launch this week of a remote management endpoint security offering called ePolicy Orchestrator platform (ePO) Deep Command. ePO is used for a wide variety of security tasks, including endpoint and server protection updates.

According to McAfee endpoint security senior vice-president, Candice Horley, who joined Watts on stage, administrators could enable remote access, regardless of whether a PC is turned on, by using ePO Deep Command.

“This means admins can remotely fix compromised systems and wake up and patch systems,” she said. “It is targeted at customers who have PCs running Intel i5 and i7 processors.”

Second on the list of areas of collaborations was a partnership between McAfee and another Intel subsidiary, mobile and embedded software company, Wind River.

“The areas they will be focusing on are integrity monitoring, change control management and the [McAfee] global threat intelligence reports, combining those with Windriver’s imbedded operating systems that are used in devices such as ATM machines and medical devices,” Watts said.

Next is securing mobile devices, such as smartphones, with Intel and McAfee already beginning to collaborate in areas such as secure operating systems, identity management and secure applications.

The fourth area was around public and private Cloud security. According to Watts, the two companies are building an identity and trust management platform to devices, users and applications combined with global threat intelligence reports.

“Last but not least they are working with us to activate features that exist in silicon Intel chips today, so McAfee is currently looking at those to see what they can take advantage of,” she said. Watts did not detail what those chip features would include.

Hamish Barwick travelled to Focus11 as a guest of McAfee

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