McAfee cloud security platform expands to Microsoft Azure

In its first move following the acquisition of Skyhigh Networks, McAfee extended its cloud security platform to cover Microsoft Azure.

McAfee last year acquired cloud access security broker Skyhigh, which had previously introduced a dedicated cloud security service for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Now, McAfee is taking a page from the Skyhigh for AWS service and bringing it to Azure.

"We're extending many of the security controls we have for AWS to Azure," Rajiv Gupta, senior vice president of McAfee's cloud security business unit and former CEO of Skyhigh, told SearchSecurity.

The McAfee Cloud Security Platform includes McAfee Skyhigh Security Cloud, which is built on Skyhigh's CASB platform, and now provides Microsoft Azure customers with the ability to audit the security configuration and compliance settings of their resources; capture and analyze audit trails for both general users and administrators; use machine learning-based threat detection to identify compromised accounts and potential insider threats; and identify and prevent unauthorized storage of sensitive data in Azure Storage or Azure Blob containers with data loss prevention policies.

Like the Skyhigh for AWS service, the McAfee Skyhigh Security Cloud component integrates with Azure's existing security features and APIs.

In addition, the McAfee Cloud Security Platform includes several of the vendor's existing products such as the McAfee Virtual Network Security Platform (vNSP) and McAfee Cloud Workload Security. The company said the platform's offerings are all currently available to Azure customers except McAfee vNSP, which will be available at the end of this month.

Gupta said the expansion of the McAfee Cloud Security Platform to Azure addresses a key problem for enterprises that have mixed cloud environments. "One of the biggest challenges for enterprise security teams today is that they're using so many different cloud environments," Gupta said. "Because they're different, they require different security controls, management consoles, policies and so many other things."

The McAfee Cloud Security Platform allows customers who have both AWS and Azure resources to use a single platform to secure and manage those resources, Gupta said. He added the platform is part of McAfee's current plan to push deeper into cloud security. "Endpoint devices and cloud are the new control points in this decade, not the network," Gupta said. "We want to give organizations a common, consistent way to manage and protect their data whether it's in the cloud or on devices."

The platform is also an continuation of Skyhigh's product roadmap unveiled last February. Skyhigh, which like most CASBs had traditionally focused on securing SaaS, expanded into the IaaS space with Skyhigh for IaaS Platforms and the dedicated Skyhigh for AWS service.