McAfee Partners with Riverbed on Security Gateways

The latest example of this trend is an alliance between Riverbed Technology and McAfee, under which McAfee security software can be deployed on top of Steelhead appliances from Riverbed in the form of a new gateway edition of McAfee Web Security. In addition, the two companies are making available a gateway edition of an anti-malware product.

According to David Scholtz, senior vice president for global alliances at McAfee, this alliance will allow IT organizations in many cases to eliminate the need for dedicated security appliances at the edge of the network. Instead, they can now opt to deploy McAfee security software on Riverhead appliances that have been configured with VMware software that allows those devices to run multiple types of security application in addition to providing wide area network (WAN) optimization services.

This alliance, which extends an existing firewall gateway alliance between the two companies, will also allow IT organizations to more easily set policies that tie the management of security anomalies to bandwidth management, said Scholtz.