McAfee announces upgrade to ePO management console

McAfee on Monday announced it will deliver an updated version of ePolicy Orchestrator, its umbrella management console for McAfee security products, by the third quarter of this year.

Now in beta, McAfee ePO 4.0 offers new management functionality, including its Web-based console and dashboard-based custom-configurable reports, while also remaining backward-compatible with the current ePO 3.6. Vimal Solanki, McAfee’s senior director of product marketing, says ePO has also been integrated with Microsoft Active Directory so enterprises using it can opt to leverage that to manage McAfee-based security and policy-compliance.

“We’re giving users the choice to use the current ePO approach or Active Directory,” Solanki says. “Some organizations have already made a heavy investment in Active Directory, they have policies based on it, so we are capitalizing on that.”

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McAfee on Monday announced it will deliver an updated version of ePolicy Orchestrator, its umbrella management console for McAfee security products, by the third quarter of this year.

Now in beta, McAfee ePO 4.0 offers new management functionality, including its Web-based console and dashboard-based custom-configurable reports, while also remaining backward-compatible with the current ePO 3.6. Vimal Solanki, McAfee’s senior director of product marketing, says ePO has also been integrated with Microsoft Active Directory so enterprises using it can opt to leverage that to manage McAfee-based security and policy-compliance.

“We’re giving users the choice to use the current ePO approach or Active Directory,” Solanki says. “Some organizations have already made a heavy investment in Active Directory, they have policies based on it, so we are capitalizing on that.”

In addition, ePO 4.0 will introduce “role-based access control for administrative purposes,” Solanki says. This enhancement brings a way to partition administrative rights and responsibilities.

McAfee ePO 4.0, which can manage McAfee’s and Symantec’s antivirus software as well as McAfee intrusion-prevention, network-access control, desktop firewalls and other products, will also have a custom dashboard and workflow that the administrator can set up to provide reports.

The single McAfee product not managed under ePO today is the data-loss prevention, which is expected to be brought under the ePO umbrella in the fall.

McAfee ePO, which is used by 30,000 enterprises, is typically included without separate pricing as part of McAfee enterprise products.

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