McAfee & Riverbed Partner To Deliver Security, WAN Optimisation

McAfee and Riverbed Technology have announced a partnership that delivers a best-of-breed security and wide area network (WAN) optimisation solution for organisations with remote offices. The one-box solution, which will include a virtual instance of McAfee Firewall Enterprise software running on the Riverbed Steelhead appliance, will enable enterprises to deliver accelerated data and application access to users while protecting critical information and infrastructure from security threats.

The joining of forces between McAfee and Riverbed Technology will help customers cost effectively address the distributed computing challenges associated with key IT initiatives such as server centralisation, data centre consolidation and a highly mobile workforce.

Riverbed WAN optimisation solutions enable organisations to overcome a range of IT and private cloud infrastructure performance bottlenecks, including poor application performance, slow database back-ups and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites.

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The Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) is a virtualised, extensible data services platform integrated with the Steelhead appliance hardware that allows customers to deploy multiple best-of-breed edge services that formerly required dedicated servers. Customers can deploy virtualised applications, such as McAfee Firewall Enterprise software, directly on the RSP to further minimise the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office, thereby reducing operational overhead.

With McAfee Firewall Enterprise software, administrators can put firewall rules in the proper business context and take advantage of centralised firewall management, reporting and user-friendly rule creation capabilities. Additionally, McAfee Firewall Enterprise software offers threat protection in areas such as VPN for secure site-to-site connectivity, anti-spam, URL and Web content filtering, encrypted traffic inspection, configurable application-level protection, and reputation-based global threat intelligence to block attacks before they occur.

“Riverbed’s customers are consolidating their IT infrastructure and moving data farther from users, which has negatively impacted the response times of business-critical applications. Our WAN optimisation solutions help enterprises overcome these issues and deliver LAN-like application performance to distributed employees,” said Venugopal Pai, Vice President of alliances at Riverbed. “In addition to accelerating performance over the WAN, it is a logical extension to partner with companies like McAfee whose best-of-breed network security solutions are essential for a reliable, distributed IT infrastructure.”

“Customers are demanding simplified management and security that’s integrated into critical network infrastructure platforms, such as the Riverbed Steelhead appliance,” said Dan Ryan, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Network Security business unit at McAfee. “By recognising the eventual integration and overlap of security within the network environment, we are taking a proactive approach to offering customers a set of proven solutions that provide choice and flexibility in the marketplace. The coupling of the strengths of both companies is expected to deliver a set of solutions that customers can depend on to protect their valuable data assets.”

Availability

The joint solution is scheduled to be available in April.