McAfee Turns To Intel To Boost Cloud Security

McAfee has turned to its parent company Intel to boost authentication and other features within McAfee's Cloud Security Platform, released in May.

The upgrade, introduced Monday, includes two modules developed by Intel, but rebranded for McAfee: the Intel Expressway Cloud Access 360 and the Expressway Service Gateway. "What the release this week really outlines is a total integrated platform where we're really highlighting some of the assets that we acquired through Intel, specifically around identity and identity management," Scott Chasin, chief technology officer for McAfee cloud security, said.

The integration is about McAfee extending security policies that exist behind the corporate firewall to a cloud environment, such as Salesforce.com. The data traffic that McAfee protects is Web, e-mail and authentication and identity, major issues for companies adopting cloud services. The new modules in McAfee's platform include Cloud Identity Manager, a rebranding of Cloud Access 360. Manager extends single sign on from the enterprise to the cloud, Chasin says. "Nobody wants another password to manage to log into Salesforce." Identity Manager uses SAML, or security assertion markup language, as the XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data, so corporate employees can sign onto the company's network and also have access to cloud-based applications.