McAfee, Cisco tie up for faster threats detection solutions

Realising the wide adoption of open security platform, global cybersecurity firm McAfee and networking and security major Cisco on Thursday collaborated to provide comprehensive visibility and real-time security orchestration.

In industry's largest threat protection integration, New Data Exchange Layer (DXL) and Cisco Platform Exchange Grid (pxGrid) now interoperate -- marking a collaboration to share security incident and contextual information in real time -- to detect and stop threats faster and to reduce the complexity of an organisation's security architecture.

The announcement came at MPOWER Cybersecurity Summit here as the companies collaborated through the McAfeeSecurity Innovation Alliance programme that demonstrates the industry move to collaborative, open and integrated security.

"We must empower security teams to stop spending their time on tedious integrations and manual tasks and instead, focus on defending against adversaries," Raja Patel, Vice President and General Manager - Corporate Products at McAfee told reporters.

"Collaboration like we are doing with Cisco, IBM Security and others throughout the security industry is critical to closing information gaps, breaking silos and providing the visibility we need to protect our most important assets from cybercriminals," he added.

With the two fabrics interoperating, organisations can now drive integrations with security solutions from hundreds of vendors.

Furthermore, through the OpenDXL initiative -- launched in 2016 to accelerate enterprise use of DXL -- integration and orchestration are now extended to open source and enterprise applications.

Together McAfee and Cisco are delivering automated processes that can cross previously siloed tools, and link endpoint, network and security operation domains, closing security gaps that prevent efficient and effective threat management.

Bi-directional data flow that enriches integrated applications with detailed information, allowing analysts visibility into critical data such as what is on their network, current security posture, privilege levels, and more.

"Cisco pxGrid and DXL interoperability mark the first time this has been achieved at such scale due to the wide cross-section of customers we each serve and the many that we share," Jeff Reed, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Security Business Group at Cisco, said.

McAfee also released DXL 4.0 and new open source tools that provide an enterprise-class environment for developers to facilitate effective use and accelerate creation.

The newly-released DXL features include easy pxGrid integration, automated incident response to threat events, simplified client provisioning and process updates.

Meanwhile, McAfee Security Innovation Alliance (SIA) ecosystem continues to flourish as the cybersecurity giant announced addition of new partners, reaching more than 130 members.

The newly added partners include, IBM Security, Micron Technology and SailPoint, among others.

(Sourabh Kulesh is in Las Vegas on the invitation of McAfee. He can be contacted at sourabh.k@ians.in)

--IANS

sku/nir