Latest McAfee DLP update adds database crawling, faster rollout

Vendor claims latest version better integrates its 2008 acquisition of Reconnex Inc., builds on support of its ePolicy Orchestrator for easier policy management.

McAfee said the latest version of its data loss prevention (DLP) suite increases the speed in which a company can get the technology up and running.

The software giant rolled out McAfee DLP 9, integrating its acquisition of DLP vendor Reconnex Inc. The updated suite includes many of the Reconnex features, touting the ability to create common policy across all components, database crawling to find sensitive data that needs monitoring, easier workflow through McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) platform and improved support for Microsoft Active Directory.

McAfee DLP is appliance-based and uses a host agent via its ePO. Last year, McAfee rolled out support of all its products for its policy management platform, ePO. The management console displays data from all its products and provides management capabilities.

Trent Henry, principal analyst for Burton Group’s security and risk management strategies service told me McAfee’s DLP offering is intriguing. McAfee did not participate in a DLP market study conducted by Henry last year since it had just purchased Reconnex and was integrating it at the time.
But Henry said McAfee has some good out-of the box policy functionality. The product also has better discovery of structured data, giving users the ability to discover where intellectual property might reside. “That could cause policy development to go faster than in the past,” he said.

McAfee is touting that deployment can occur within days as opposed to the typical six to nine month period. But Henry said it depends on what the company means with the term deployment. Typically it takes a short time to get a DLP technology deployed, but the bulk of the work – data discovery and policy testing – can take months, he said.