Technology & Tools

Intel Steps Up Focus on Threat Landscape

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 12/03/2015

Intel Corp. is bolstering its $3 billion security business with a broader portfolio of offerings intended to address the entire threat landscape -- from sensors and PCs to mobile devices and the cloud.

Security industry veteran Christopher Young, brought in a year ago from Cisco Systems Inc. to head up Intel Security, has brought in a new executive team and rolled out two new products at the company's recent Focus conference in Las Vegas.

One is the new McAfee EndPoint Security 10.x, an endpoint threat detection and response platform, which Young said is based on significant architectural changes from the initial version released early last year. Besides improved performance, the company claims it offers visibility to advanced threats and offers high-speed detection and remediation.

The other new product is McAfee Active Response, which provides continuous monitoring and enables incident response while giving administrators views via the McAFee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) management console. "We're getting into the game to help our customers be better at hunting and detecting for the undetectable threats with McAfee Active Response," Young said in his keynote at the Focus conference.

Young also talked up support for its Threat Intelligence Exchange (TIE), based on its McAfee Data Exchange Layer (DXL), which the company describes as its "architecture for adaptive security." Intel announced the exchange last year describing DXL as "a real-time, bi-directional, communications fabric allowing security components to operate as one immediately sharing relevant data between endpoint, gateway, and other security products enabling security intelligence and adaptive security."

SolarWinds Adds Server Health Monitor
SolarWinds LLC, which this fall agreed to a buyout by a private equity firm for $4.5 billion, has added a free tool that offers administrators detailed views into servers from multiple vendors.

The SolarWinds Server Health Monitor is a component of the company's flagship SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor suite, which offers performance metrics covering more than 200 applications out of the box including Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory and IIS..

The new tool covers up to five server nodes issuing and monitors such hardware characteristics as fan speed, temperature, power supply, CPU and battery levels. According to the company, it lets administrators determine server hardware issues that are impacting compute and application performance. It is certified to monitor hardware health metrics for Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, Lenovo eServer xSeries servers and VMware ESX/ESXi hypervisors.

Veeam Targets Enterprises with Replication in New Availability Suite
Veeam now wants to be known as the company that can ensure "availability for the always-on enterprise." The company will take a key step toward that goal with the Veeam Availability Suite v9, slated for release this quarter. The new release adds an unlimited scale-out data repository and built-in replication in one solution. With its tight integration with Hyper-V and VMware, as well as storage devices of its alliance partners Cisco, EMC Corp., HP and NetApp, the company claims it'll deliver real-time and point recovery objectives within 15 minutes.

In addition, it will offer improved support for cloud services with enhancements to its year-old Cloud Connect tool that'll make it available to clouds of all sizes ranging from small, single-site locations to larger, multi-site locations with support coming for Microsoft Azure.

"Veeam has built a great business in the [midsize] business and SMB," CEO Ratmir Timashev said a keynote address at the company's second annual VeeamOn conference for customers and partners in Las Vegas. "We want to be the de facto standard within the enterprise."