Sometimes having too many products doesn’t help IT departments but confuses them
That’s what McAfee Inc. found out when talking to organizations about endpoint security. The company has admitted that having nine groups of products for businesses wasn’t helping them solve problems, so it has merged tjem into two suites – one for large enterprises, and one for small to mid-size ones. And it cut the price.
They not only include traditional malware protection but also Deep Defender, a rootkit protection and mobile device management.
The suites have slightly different capabilities: The Enterprise edition include dynamic whitelisting and an endpoint risk analyzer. The Business edition lacks those, but does including the ability to encrypt data.
As expected, the suites can be overseen by McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator management application, which is included.
“We continually release new products to solve new threats as they emerge, but our customers and our partners really struggle to keep up with us,”
Simon Hunt, (pictured above) McAfee’s vice-president and CTO for end point security, said in explaining the new strategy. As result lot of customers don’t have the right mix of solutions for protection. protect them.
Many IT departments look to us to tell them whether they should be concerned about threats, he said — for example rootkits, for which McAfee has a separate solution.
“A lot of time I talk to customers who have been hit with a virus and they ask ‘What did we do wrong?’ and sometimes the answer is they didn’t buy enough, or didn’t use enough of the technology they bought.”
“It’s devastating to know there was a button they could have pushed (to activate a capability) to protect them.”
Ideally, having virtually everything in one suite will solve that, McAfee believes.
Pricing has been radically slashed. Hunt said an average customer will pay about $30 a node, compared to a total of $180 if all of the capabilities were bought separately as they were sold until now.
The company hasn’t completely collapsed its enterprise end point products into two boxes. For organizations that prefer, it still sells McAfee Endpoint Protection-Advanced Suite and Endpoint Protection Suite.