Crossbeam and McAfee Enter into Strategic Partnership

Crossbeam Systems and McAfee, a dedicated security technology company, entered into a strategic partnership that enables a new security solution combining the McAfee (News - Alert) next-generation firewall, McAfee Firewall Enterprise, with Crossbeam’s latest X-Series family of network security platforms.

Officials with Crossbeam (News - Alert) Systems said in a press release that the X-Series family enables McAfee Firewall Enterprise to deliver carrier-class performance, with speeds up to 40 Gbps of inspected application traffic throughput, scalability and built-in redundancy that large enterprises and carriers need to secure their networks.

“The Crossbeam-McAfee partnership will improve options for customers at the high end of the market who are looking for high-performance, manageable security solutions that can scale with their networks,” said Chris Christiansen, program VP of security products and services at IDC (News - Alert).

Christiansen said that firewalls combining intrusion prevention, application awareness and other network security capabilities that can address the changing nature of Web-based communications are in demand, especially as organizations move to cloud-based computing environments.

He said that the Crossbeam-McAfee solution delivers these firewall capabilities on a platform that’s proven to perform within these networks.

The McAfee next-generation firewall provides visibility into both external and internal threats and vulnerabilities, protecting customers more efficiently and allowing them to safely support the rapid growth in Web-based applications on their networks with confidence and compliance.

According to company officials, with McAfee running on Crossbeam’s X-Series, customers achieve cost-reduction and consolidation goals, while improving overall security posture.

Company officials said that the X-Series allows organizations to consolidate security appliances and related network devices onto a single high-performance chassis, slashing total cost of ownership by as much as 70 percent when compared to other options and approaches on the market today.

“The widespread adoption of Web 2.0, social networking, smart mobile devices and other Web-based technologies has significantly increased the level of risk for organizations,” said Rees Johnson, senior VP and general manager for Network Security of McAfee. Johnson continued that by partnering with Crossbeam, McAfee is meeting the growing demand among government, large enterprises and carriers to protect against these threats, and to reduce the cost and complexity of their security infrastructures.

“Crossbeam’s strategy from the beginning has been to enable customers to run their preferred security applications on open platforms that can handle the demands of any size network,” said Jim Freeze, chief marketing officer of Crossbeam. Freeze said that by partnering with McAfee, the company is giving its customers even more flexibility to choose their preferred best-of-breed solutions and deploy them on the industry’s most proven family of next-generation network security platforms.

Crossbeam Systems said that it offers a proven approach to deploying network security that meets the extreme performance, scalability and reliability demands of large enterprises, service providers and government agencies.