McAfee today outlined a strategy to extend its antivirus product line into the areas of offline virtual images, SAP’s NetWeaver as well as storage systems from EMC and Sun Microsystems.

McAfee plans to roll out versions of its Windows server-based VirusScan Enterprise software for these three areas by the end of next month that will work by residing next to protected data assets to scan for viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, botnets and rootkits, according to Malav Patel, McAfee group product marketing manager. (Compare antivirus products.)

First off, VirusScan Enterprise for Offline Virtual Images is designed to protect virtual-machine offline images of operating systems and applications that network managers have created using VMware, Citrix XenSource or Microsoft’s Hyper-V.

“Offline images are usually stored as a ‘gold master’ for disaster recovery of document images or as part of a backup testing cycle,” says Patel. As such, they are stored off the general network and may not receive regular scans or antivirus updates. McAfee’s upcoming product is designed to scan these offline images.

The second product on tap is VirusScan Enterprise for SAP's NetWeaver, which will be able to scan data before it’s entered into the SAP platform that includes its enterprise portal and customer-relationship management applications.

There’s a need to protect these because “a hacker may submit a malicious file which can corrupt the entire system and affect the supply chain,” says Patel. “We’ve seen this happen to customers, for example in the form of a résumé coming into the eRecuitment module in the HR department.”

The server-based VirusScan, based on a set of APIs that support NetWeaver, would receive any incoming document and scan it before its final delivery to the SAP application itself.

The third product, VirusScan for Storage, adds support for the EMC and Sun storage systems. Until now, McAfee had supported only NetApp.

Management of all the upcoming VirusScan products will be provided under McAfee’s umbrella management console, ePolicy orchestrator. Pricing for the products, expected out next month, hasn’t been announced.