McAfee Focusing on Small Businesses
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McAfee is focusing on security products and support for small and midsize businesses.
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Already entrenched in smaller companies, the trend of grouping security resources into a "single box" is gaining ground in larger enterprises.
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As malware threats and regulatory compliance demands continue to grow more complex, IT will become increasingly dependent on SaaS (software as a service) offerings that let them respond to problems faster while also saving money, according to top executives at the world's largest anti-malware vendors.In addition to continued adoption of managed security services delivered on- and off-site by professional consultants, IT customers will be able to resolve some of the problems they have with existing IT systems defense and compliance automation tools by shifting away from on-premise technologies in favor of adopting more hosted applications, vendor executives contend.While security technologies such as end-point protection suites and IDS (intrusion detection systems) will likely always require the use of software agents that reside on customers' devices and network infrastructure, vendor executives claim that a range of technologies, including exploit-prevention tools and compliance-monitoring filters, will gradually move to the SaaS model.As a result, providers such as McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro, among others, are already ramping up their SaaS portfolios to adapt to the shift."We believe that [SaaS] is the wave of future, and we already deal with the issue of updating tens of millions of machines remotely multiple times per day in multiple geographies. It's one of most complex things to do in all of technology, and one of the most impressive assets that I think we have," said David DeWalt, CEO of McAfee."IT budgets are not growing, but the threats and regulatory demands are, and customers are finding themselves thin on resources. SaaS will be a great way for businesses to save on infrastructure and maintenance costs while improving protection," said Jeff Hausman, Symantec's senior director of product management. "There's no question that the hosted model is growing dramatically."McAfee expects a SaaS transition over time Building on the infrastructure that vendors such as McAfee have already established to distribute anti-malware signatures and other product updates to their customers, the companies will add new SaaS offerings incrementally as customers warm up to the ideal.The security software providers themselves must also figure out the appropriate mix of on- and off-site tools, as well as refine pricing policies for the services over the next few years, CEO DeWalt said.However, DeWalt recognized that the process of designing and delivering SaaS products -- and selling customers on their benefits -- won't be achieved overnight. "It's a very complicated technology project, sometimes not even related to development of our own technology, but based on the IT infrastructure needed to deliver SaaS as effectively," he said. "We've learned a lot through our experiences building [anti-malware] products for the consumer and small-business markets, and we'll use those lessons to move into the SaaS business over time."As part of its move into SaaS, McAfee announced the acquisition of ScanAlert, a provider of hosted e-commerce Web site security services, for $51 million in October 2007. The company will consider additional deals in the area if there are targets that can aid in its development of the business, DeWalt said.Trend Micro, others see Intelligence in the cloud Along with e-mail filtering services -- one breed of security SaaS application that has already proven a hit with customers of companies such as Postini, which Google acquired for $625 million in July 2007 -- vendor executives contend that hosted tools used to provide end-point and network security management services will be among the first to find favor with IT and end-users.Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen said a growing number of the firm's small-business customers are already using its Remote Manager hosted tools to maintain configuration of their security programs and prevent their end-point systems from being altered by malware programs such as rootkits."We began quietly moving forward in this direction several years ago, but I believe 2008 will be a big year for SaaS development, not only because of vendor initiatives, but because of the need to deal with new threats among customers," Chen said."We think that there will be a need to move anti-threat knowledge from the customer into the cloud," Chen said. "Instead of having them download a virus pattern file, we will filter things and compare them to intelligence in the cloud, and then go to the end-user and update them without having to download the larger files used today."Keeping the channel involved Established SaaS applications in other markets, such as Salesforce.com's hosted sales-force automation tools, have traditionally bypassed resellers and other channel players and instead been provided directly to customers by vendors themselves. That may not be the case for SaaS-delivered anti-malware, Chen said.The reason? Even though SaaS tools are meant to alleviate many of the management concerns related to traditional on-premise products by handing the responsibilities back to the vendors, channel partners will be important in providing any services necessary to help users transition to the delivery model, or to customize the applications to individual business environments and provide any needed support services, Chen said.Symantec, which has pledged to turn as many of its products into SaaS offerings as it can do profitably, has also promised to keep its resellers in the loop as its brings new hosted services to market. Most customers adopting SaaS services will still consume traditional security products, leading the company to pursue a hybrid strategy that mixes the two disciplines, said product director Hausman."We have the infrastructure to provide the service, but resellers will still maintain a lot of the relationships," Hausman said. "We're the brand behind delivery to the customer, but the partner is still the same name and face that customers have grown comfortable dealing with over time."Diverse opportunities Symantec's maiden foray into SaaS is its Protection Network online secure backup service aimed initially at smaller customers, hundreds of which are already piloting the offering, according to Hausman. But Symantec is preparing several other hosted products for release.E-mail security is one area where Symantec sees SaaS opportunities, built on the success of acquired companies such as Postini. Other services that the company is pursuing might come as a surprise, including its bet that elements of DLP (data leakage prevention) and compliance monitoring can be moved to the SaaS delivery model.Vontu, the DLP gateway specialist that Symantec purchased in November 2007 for $350 million, didn't have a SaaS offering under development, but Hausman believes that under Symantec's wing, the unit can create new capabilities by tying some of the on-premise capabilities of its technology with in-the-cloud services for message filtering and archiving.Other opportunities for SaaS will emerge around anti-virus protection, security policy management, remote systems management and IT continuity protection, he said.
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The smaller firm's technology will help strengthen Computer Associates' ability to provide authentication tools, the company says.
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McAfee Inc.'s purchase of Foundstone follows several moves in the past year to focus its product offerings and bolster its standing in the intrusion detection and prevention market.
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Company looks to juice its application server business with a version tuned for smaller organizations.
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McAfee on Monday unveiled a new security service designed to let small companies outsource their e-mail security to the antivirus software maker.
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By Dave Gallagher, The Bellingham Herald, Wash.  Feb. 11--Sandy Keathley recently dealt with a problem that many small business owners fear: Computer woes were holding her company hostage.
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Security company Symantec Corp. plans to announce the release of a patch management product on Monday that it says will enable small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to stay on top of software vulnerabilities.
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New service offers spam, virus filtering for small and mid-sized businesses.
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The Mac maker has big plans to expand its network of retail outlets by creating small versions of its stores.
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InfoWorld - McAfee plans to deliver more scalable versions of its e-mail and Web security appliances designed for enterprise users.
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McAfee's 2005 product line has hit the store shelves. According to McAfee, its security solutions have been tweaked to hone in on identity theft, phishing scams, spyware and other malicious threats. The line includes: McAfee VirusScan, McAfee Personal Firewall Plus, McAfee SpamKiller, McAfee AntiSpyware, McAfee QuickClean, McAfee Internet Security Suite and McAfee VirusScan Pro. Products may be purchased online at McAfee.com. Boxed copies are available at participating retail outlets.
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Despite vendor claims to the contrary, security scanners and source-code analysis tools are generally speaking not up to the job of protecting your company's network, says one McAfee VP.
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(InfoWorld) - It took Michael Kelly just minutes to buy McAfee Inc.'s software. But getting the anti-virus vendor to stop charging his credit card was another matter altogether. McAfee is on the vanguard of a new trend in the security software industry: selling software as a service that is automatically billed each year. McAfee began automatically renewing customers in 2001, but over the past year the practice has become much more common, as Symantec Corp. and Microsoft Corp., with its new Windows Live OneCare products, have adopted the automatic renewals. The vendors say that these programs are good for consumers. As many as two-thirds of antivirus users postpone their subscription renewal, leaving PCs unprotected from the latest attacks, they say. But as Kelly discovered after spending more than half an hour trying to drop his McAfee antivirus subscription, the automatic renewals have a downside too. "The best practice has turned into the one that's best for the company and not for the customer," said Kelly, who blogged about his problems in early October. Kelly is chief executive officer of Techtel Corp., a market research firm in Emeryville, California. Complaints like Kelly's may start piling up as more PC users become enrolled in automatic update programs. In early November 2005 Symantec Corp. began enrolling North American customers in automatic renewal by default, and it has now expanded the practice into Europe. By next year the program, called Ongoing Protection, will be worldwide, said Javed Hasan, senior director of product marketing with Symantec. The vendors have taken steps to prevent their customers from being surprised by automatic renewals. Like Microsoft and McAfee, Symantec's sign-up forms make it clear that online customers are entering an automatic renewal program, and the vendors send a notification e-mail to customers before they place the new charges on their credit cards. So far "the large majority of customers" are allowing Symantec to auto-renew their subscriptions, Hasan said. "We are very happy with the results that we're seeing now." While automatic renewals can be convenient, they will make software license management more complicated for small businesses that are not cutting volume license deals, said Josh Kaplan, national marketing director for Rescuecom Corp., a computer services company in Syracuse, New York. Companies will need to keep tabs on subscriptions to make sure that they are not charged subscription fees for PCs that are no longer in use, and the automatic renewals will inject some complexity into any efforts to switch security software vendors, he said. Kaplan says that many of his customers have been caught unprepared for the switch to automatic renewals, although this is not necessarily a bad thing. "I have had customers who tell me that their antivirus is expired, and who are actually renewed," he said. "I haven't had any angry customers yet regarding that, but I've had quite a few surprised ones." Online customers are being registered in these auto-renewal programs by default, though they won't be able to do this in some countries, where the practice is outlawed. Customers who purchase products at retail, or who have the security software pre-installed on their PC may not be entered into auto-renewal. In North America, for example, there is no way for McAfee, Microsoft and Symantec customers to opt out of the program during the online sign-up process. But both McAfee and Symantec offer users a way to keep charges from automatically showing up on their credit cards one year later. When Symantec customers sign up for security products the company sends them a link to a cancellation form they can complete to opt out of auto-renewals. In North America, McAfee customers can call 1-800-791-4577. Things are not so simple with OneCare. Customers who have purchased the product online have only one way to opt out of automatic renewals: they can cancel their subscriptions altogether. To do this, customers must call OneCare's customer support number: 1-866-663-2273. One year into Ongoing Protection, Symantec still has some bugs in the cancellation process. Customers who don't save their initial e-mail with the link to the cancellation form are supposed to be able to drop the service on Symantec's customer account portal . But because of a glitch in the system, Symantec is now falsely notifying new customers that they "do not have any products or services with automatic renewal turned on," even though they are signed up for automatic renewals by default. It takes about a month after purchase for the portal to register the fact that customers are enrolled in automatic renewals, a company spokeswoman said. "There's just a little bit of a lag time there, unfortunately." The company expects to iron out this bug within the month, she added. Selling software as a service is nothing new -- the industry has been slowly adopting this model for several years now -- but security software is a little different, said John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "Companies in this business have a special obligation not to violate the same rules that they are accusing others of violating," he said. "I don't think any different rules should apply to a large antivirus provider than should apply to someone offering a free screen saver," he added. Michael Kelly thinks renewing customers should be given the same kind price breaks that are commonly used to entice new customers, but despite his experience, he still likes the idea in principle. "The benefits are good, as long as they maintain good two-way communication and make it easy for you to cut it off." (Additional reporting by Narasu Rebbapragada, senior associate editor at PC World US)
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Trend Micro has displaced McAfee in becoming the new anti-virus solution provider for MSN Hotmail. Trend will provide both anti-virus scanning and cleaning protection for MSN Hotmail&#39;s 187 million email accounts.
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A dot-com enabler for small financial institutions is rolling in the dough.