McAfee flags Australia data centre build

McAfee has immediate plans to build points of presence (PoP) in Australia to provide its web security services to local customers, McAfee executives told CRN today. 

Michael Sentonas, chief technology officer for McAfee Asia Pacific, said McAfee was building "points of presence" in Australia to serve cloud-based email and web filtering services.

"We are going to progress in building that capability and we are going to offer it through our typical channels," Sentonas said.

"The key point here is that we're looking at it and we're quite progressed in that model. We're also hoping to make some key announcements about web type filtering services for the Australian market," he said.

For channel partners, Sentonas said the "points of presence" will give [them] an additional product to sell.

"Building a presence doesn't mean that you compete with the channel - it means that you have the capability to offer those services that the channel can then sell to customers.

"It still gives [hosting providers] the chance to offer the management and reporting capabilities. For many organisations it's one thing to get the pipe, it's another to analyse what's going through pipe," he said.

Earlier, visiting chief executive Dave DeWalt said McAfee's goal was to continue to expand its data centre presence from 110 countries to "as many countries as it can possibly deploy it".

"We've got a number around the world already and we're starting to put them in virtual private clouds as well as in corporations and government networks as well," he said. 

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Strategy

McAfee's cloud strategy was about intelligence gathering and serving cloud technologies such as email and web security, Sentonas said. 

"Over the last two years we've been working to turn all of our products into telemetry centres.

"That means the end points feed information back about anomalous behaviour, and the gateway products feed back anomalous behaviour. That's on top of the traditional research that we continue to do."

Expanding on the security vendor's long-term strategy, DeWalt said McAfee wanted to solve three things - security in the cloud, at the end-point and on the network.

"Our technology is called Artemis - which is our cloud based solution - we have a number of generations coming out that adhere to that."

Artemis has been out for 18 months and has about 35 million users deployed on it, he said.