SCIENCE

Crossbeam Systems and McAfee has announced at FOCUS 10 a strategic partnership that enables a new security solution combining the McAfee next-generation firewall, McAfee Firewall Enterprise, with Crossbeam's latest X-Series family of network security platforms.

Announced last week, the Crossbeam X-Series family enables McAfee Firewall Enterprise to deliver carrier-class performance -- with speeds up to 40 Gbps of inspected application traffic throughput -- scalability and built-in redundancy that large enterprises and carriers need to secure their networks. Demonstrations of the Crossbeam-McAfee solution can be seen at Crossbeam's booth, #160.

"The Crossbeam-McAfee partnership will improve options for customers at the high end of the market who are looking for high-performance, manageable security solutions that can scale with their networks," said Chris Christiansen, program vice president, Security Products and Services at IDC. "Firewalls combining intrusion prevention, application awareness and other network security capabilities that can address the changing nature of Web-based communications are in demand, especially as organizations move to cloud-based computing environments. The Crossbeam-McAfee solution delivers these firewall capabilities on a platform that's proven to perform within these networks."

The McAfee next-generation firewall provides unprecedented visibility into both external and internal threats and vulnerabilities, protecting customers more efficiently and allowing them to safely support the rapid growth in Web-based applications on their networks with confidence and compliance. McAfee Firewall Enterprise now protects 15,000 networks around the world, including some of the most ultra-secure government organizations and seven of the top 10 financial institutions.

With McAfee running on Crossbeam's X-Series, customers achieve cost-reduction and consolidation goals, while improving overall security posture. The X-Series allows organizations to consolidate security appliances and related network devices onto a single high-performance chassis, slashing total cost of ownership by as much as 70 percent when compared to other options and approaches on the market today.

"The widespread adoption of Web 2.0, social networking, smart mobile devices and other Web-based technologies has significantly increased the level of risk for organizations," said Rees Johnson, senior vice president and general manager for Network Security of McAfee. "By partnering with Crossbeam, McAfee is meeting the growing demand among government, large enterprises and carriers to protect against these threats, and to reduce the cost and complexity of their security infrastructures."

The ongoing proliferation of Web threats has caused significant demand for next-generation firewalls. Gartner believes that "less than 1 percent of Internet connections today are secured using next-generation firewalls (NGFWs). We believe that by year-end 2014 this will rise to 35 percent of the installed base, with 60% of new purchases being NGFWs." (1)

"Crossbeam's strategy from the beginning has been to enable customers to run their preferred security applications on open platforms that can handle the demands of any size network," said Jim Freeze, chief marketing officer of Crossbeam. "By partnering with McAfee, we're giving our customers even more flexibility to choose their preferred best-of-breed solutions and deploy them on the industry's most proven family of next-generation network security platforms."