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McAfee Launches Platform To Secure AWS Workloads
A new offering from security software giant McAfee is designed specifically to protect workloads in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.
The McAfee Virtual Network Security Platform (vNSP), which the company demonstrated at Monday's AWS Summit event in New York City, aims to protect organizations' AWS-based assets at the workload level.
According to McAfee, this is a departure from the approach taken by many of its rivals, which tend to focus primarily on blanket protection for the entire network. A more workload-based security approach, McAfee argues, is more effective at protecting organizations against "the lateral movement of threats," as Vice President Shishir Singh described it in a prepared statement.
Essentially, whenever two or more servers in a single environment have the ability to communicate with each other, there is potential for malware in one server to infect the others.
McAfee says the workload-level focus of its vNSP product, unlike other solutions on the market, is better able to detect security vulnerabilities that take advantage of this server-to-server route, "eliminating a single point of failure for an entire network segment and efficiently using security resources only where directed."
The company also notes that under many cloud vendors' "shared responsibility model," such security attacks are often considered to be the responsibility of the customer, not the vendor.
"AWS covers a lot of ground, such as security of the cloud, but users are still responsible for their security in the cloud -- including securing their operating systems, applications and data traffic," Singh said. "While firewall configurations are important, security teams and cloud architects need to address exploit prevention, malware protection and gain visibility into the lateral movement of threats."
More information on McAfee's vNSP solution for AWS is available in this datasheet. McAfee is also offering a free 72-hour trial of the solution; interested organizations can sign up here.