Migration to McAfee Endpoint Security “Like Moving from a VW Bug to an Aston Martin”

Norbert Marx, a senior security engineer at Accarda, a Swiss provider of customer loyalty cards and other payment-related services, has become an evangelist of sorts for McAfee Endpoint Security (ENS) ever since his company migrated to it.

“What are you waiting for?” says Marx. “McAfee ENS protects better, is easier to use, and saves time. It is better in every way than its predecessor. It’s like two different worlds. It’s like moving from a Volkswagen bug to an Aston Martin.”

Marx is the chief person responsible for technical security decisions and troubleshooting. What he loves best about McAfee ENS is how it simplifies his job and others.  Since the company runs a lean business—it serves more than two million end customers but has just 220 employees—and has a very small security staff, ease of administration is critical.

“With our limited information security staff, a security tool must be easy to use or we won’t even consider it,” claims Marx. “It also has to do what it is supposed to do. We simply don’t have time to deal with extremely complicated systems or firefighting.”

With McAfee ENS, Accarda saves time when pushing out updates or troubleshooting. That’s because Previously the anti-virus engine, host intrusion prevention, and web control were all separate agents on each endpoint. By migrating to ENS, however, the company consolidated all those aspects of endpoint protection into a single agent.

The improved graphical user interface of McAfee ENS also facilitates endpoint security management. According to Marx, the ENS interface within McAfee ePO is notably easier to use, with very helpful and understandable graphical displays and alerts. In addition, it provides more insights into the origins, attempted actions, and targets of attacks to help with decision making and hardening of policies and defensive actions.

“What are you waiting for? McAfee ENS protects better, is easier to use, and saves time. It is better in every wya than its predecessor. It’s like two different worlds. It’s like moving from a Volkswagen bug to an Aston Martin.”

-Norbert Marx, Senior Security Engineer, Accarda

Furthermore, superior endpoint protection with McAfee ENS equates to fewer security incidents and therefore less time spent remediating. “With the added reputation and behavior-based capabilities of ENS, we can identify malware and zero-day threats more quickly and effectively,” says Marx, “and with DAC [Dynamic Application Containment], we can contain them before they can cause harm.”

Accarda’s overall security posture is also bolstered by the integration of McAfee ENS with the McAfee Data Exchange Layer (DXL) and McAfee Threat Intelligence Exchange, which combines multiple internal and external threat information sources and instantly shares this data with all the company’s DXL-connected security solutions, including McAfee Web Gateway and the McAfee SIEM.

“For instance, if an application is violating our security policy or causes suspicious activity that is detected by McAfee ENS, we can immediately tag the file as potentially malicious, thus preventing its execution anywhere in the enterprise,” explains Marx. “And with the relevant data now contained in the Threat Intelligence Exchange database, if anyone else attempts to go to that website, Web Gateway won’t allow it.”

In addition, Accarda continues to benefit from the ease of use of McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator®, (ePO™), the central management console that enables management of multiple McAfee solutions from one screen. (McAfee ePO was one of the main reasons that Accarda chose its legacy endpoint solution, the McAfee Endpoint Threat Protection suite.) At Accarda, each of the four or five people who use McAfee ePO regularly has his own dashboard for instant viewing of the information most important to him. For instance, one dashboard is strictly used by IT operations, another by the person who oversees PCs, another by a server administrator, and another by Marx for an overall view of security and troubleshooting. “Without McAfee ePO, my job would be many times more difficult,” claims Marx.

Using the McAfee migration tool inside McAfee ePO, Accarda migrated all the company’s endpoints in just one day from the McAfee VirusScan Enterprise anti-virus engine and McAfee SiteAdvisor agents in its McAfee Enterprise Threat Protection suite to McAfee ENS. An early adopter, Accarda began with ENS version 10.1 and as new versions of ENS have been released, Accarda has upgraded to them. Marx notes that each version has offered improvements over previous versions and that ENS version 10.5 is the best yet.

So what are you waiting for?

To read the full case study on the Accarda, click here. Get your questions answered by tweeting @McAfee_Business.

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