Cisco and McAfee announce partnership focused on shared threat intelligence
The need for robust online security continues to grow as hackers contrive new and creative ways to circumnavigate existing countermeasures and disrupt networks. In an effort to shield companies from these threats, Security firm McAfee announced Thursday it has partnered with Cisco to advance IT threat detection capabilities.
The partnership was made public at the McAfee MPOWER Cybersecurity Summit in Las Vegas, Nev. The companies will work to combine McAfee’s Data Exchange Layer (DXL), which enables communications between endpoints across various vendor products, with Cisco’s Platform Exchange Grid (pxGrid), a similar framework that enables security products to work together and share data. Both fabrics have nearly 100 integrated partners between them, which are collaborating to provide threat event context. By allowing the fabrics to interoperate, organizations can drive integrations with security solutions from a host of vendors.
“We must empower security teams to stop spending their time on tedious integrations and manual tasks and instead, focus on defending against adversaries,” said Raja Patel, general manager corporate products at McAfee. “Organizations should focus on maximizing the value of their environment with solutions that integrate, as opposed to layering new technologies that don’t speak to each other. Collaboration like we are doing with Cisco, IBM Security and others throughout the security industry is critical to closing information gaps, breaking silos and providing the visibility we need to protect our most important assets from cybercriminals.”
McAfee began its OpenDXL initiative in 2016, which open sourced the solution and enabled users to combine other solutions under the DXL framework. The launch was part of a bigger initiative by McAcfee to expand upon its security portfolio. At the time, Cisco was pursuing similar aims. In June 2017, the companies tag teamed an email security project by combining two products capable of detecting camouflaged email threats, which served as a stepping stone toward further collaboration between the organizations.
“We have found that many organizations struggle to integrate up to 50 security products from a like number of security vendors, resulting in security gaps that leave them vulnerable,” said said Jeff Reed, senior vice president, product management, Security Business Group, Cisco. “Defenders now have access to the industry’s most extensive and diverse set of services between network, endpoint and security operations. This collaboration between Cisco and McAfee creates great value and eases the security effort for customers,” he added.
McAfee also debuted two news security products. The McAfee Investigator leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide security professionals with the tools to respond to threats quicker. The Cloud Workload Security, on the other hand, provides security support for hybrid cloud environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
