Intel Details New Strategic Vision for Security Solutions

Intel Security announced its new strategic vision to simplify the threat defense lifecycle and help channel partners protect customer deployments.

General Manager and Senior Vice President Chris Young outlined the company’s plans during this week’s FOCUS15 partner conference, including several major changes to Intel’s investment strategy, technology road map and product portfolio. All of the changes align with the company’s strategy to develop and deploy a more integrated and open security system to protect users from malware, data leakage and targeted attacks, he noted.

At the core of Intel’s new strategy is an emphasis on helping partners strengthen their endpoint and cloud solutions, which the company believes are the most effective areas for advanced visibility and operational control. Intel also advocated a simplified user experience with a centralized management structure that reaches across both Intel’s and third-party products so organizations can simplify their threat defense efforts.

While the company has pledged to continue support for its core suite of protection solutions, Intel will continue to grow its portfolio with the addition of new detection tools and automated workflow solutions, according to the announcement. Going forward, Intel will work to help customers unify protection, detection and threat detection capabilities through an adaptive feedback loop in what the company is calling the “threat defense lifecycle.”

“The rising volume and complexity of attacks present a vicious cycle of challenges for organizations and makes speed and efficiency critical,” said Young in a statement. “With a rapidly expanding attack surface, and a shortage of relevant talent and expertise, defenders need to win on visibility into events, simplified management and capabilities that empower teams to close the loop on attacks in progress—faster, more effectively and with fewer resources.”

Intel also unveiled several new solutions as part of its expanded technology and product portfolio. Chief among the new solutions is the McAfee Endpoint Security 10.X, an endpoint services platform, which enables real-time communication between threat defenses. The platform includes faster scanning, threat updates and maximized CPU and threat performance capabilities.

Next up is McAfee Active Response, an endpoint threat detection and response solution with tools to identify and correct security issues, according to Intel. Administrators also can access security event and state details from endpoints or set up persistent collectors to monitor for changes in security posture. The solution is managed by McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator, the company’s central management platform.

Intel Security now supports both the Structured Threat Integration Expression (STIX) and Trusted Automated eXchange of Indicator Information (TAXII) standards as a way to improve threat detection rates through the sharing of threat intelligence, according to the announcement. Beginning immediately, McAfee Advanced Threat Defense now generates malware reports in STIX format, with both McAfee Threat Intelligence Exchange and McAfee Enterprise Security Manager able to ingest third-party intelligence in this format.

Finally, the introduction of the McAfee Data Exchange Layer (DXL) brings users a bidirectional communication fabric so they can share information between connected technologies. There are currently security solutions from 16 vendors running on or working with DXL through the Intel Security Innovation Alliance, according to Intel Security.

Ealier this month, Microsoft purchased Havok, Intel’s Dublin-based game developer, which Intel acquired in 2007 for $110 million.