McAfee, Riverbed partner on appliance with both WAN Optimization and multilayer security 6 April, 2010 By Mark Cox

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"This integrated solution is really changing the landscape," said David Colodny, Director of Global Strategic Alliances for McAfee. "As the threat landscape has changed dramatically, complexity has grown, and defense in depth can mean 24 different products from 10 different vendors. How do we enable security to be more agile? By using fewer platforms, embedding and integrating technologies into platforms. What we have here is a closed loop solution in real time which consolidates security technology into the WAN optimization policy."

The Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) is a virtualized, extensible data services platform integrated with the Steelhead appliance hardware that allows customers to deploy multiple best-of-breed edge services that formerly required dedicated servers. Customers can deploy virtualized applications, such as McAfee Firewall Enterprise software, directly on the RSP to further minimize the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office, thereby reducing operational overhead.

With McAfee Firewall Enterprise software, administrators can immediately begin to put firewall rules in the proper business context and take advantage of centralized firewall management, reporting and user-friendly rule creation capabilities. Additionally, McAfee Firewall Enterprise software offers unprecedented levels of threat protection such as VPN for secure site-to-site connectivity, anti-spam, URL and Web content filtering, encrypted traffic inspection, configurable application-level protection, and reputation-based global threat intelligence to block attacks before they occur.

"Riverbed has had other security partnerships, with vendors like Check Point and Websense, but bringing McAfee in is great because its such a well rounded, best of breed offering," said Nik Rouda, Director of Product Marketing for Riverbed . "The response from partners who we discussed this with has been very positive. For partners it's more choice, best of breed partnerships."

"There is more investment here by both companies with this partnership," Colodny said. "We have already cross-trained our entire support team on the Riverbed line and they are doing the same. We are also joint mapping out sales strategies."

Riverbed and McAfee will engage in co-marketing and co-selling activities for the solution, and McAfee has joined the Riverbed Technology Alliance Program as an Elite Partner.

The joint solution is scheduled to be available in April.