McAfee and Postini cosy up for security offering

Security giant McAfee has teamed up with managed email security service provider Postini to offer its customers added protection for their email, in a move typical of the consolidation occurring in the security market.

McAfee today released its Secure Messaging Service for small businesses and enterprises, based on Postini's Perimeter Manager product line.

The service, which was formerly known as the McAfee Managed Mail Protection, is managed via an online portal, building upon the perceived benefits of a managed security model, limiting the complexity of perimeter protection and taking much of the daily 'fire-fighting' out of the hands of the IT department.

Vincent Rossi, senior VP of product management at McAfee, said one of the major benefits of bringing in Postini was to tackle threats such as spam and phishing which have typically not always been catered for by McAfee's antivirus heritage.

Scott Petry, founder of Postini said in a statement: "Bringing security, trust and reliability to today's vulnerable email infrastructures doesn't come overnight. Postini's proven technology and extensive experience, of running large-scale managed services, will provide added depth to McAfee's Secure Content Management offerings and significantly strengthen their position in the email security market."

Perhaps most interestingly the deal represents further consolidation in a security market consumed by the clamour to partner with, or buy, expertise in order to offer ready-made layered solutions.

The need for a layered solution has become clear in recent years and companies are aware that the more leg work they do in making that happen the more customers they win or retain.

Most notably, the giants in the sector, such as CA, Microsoft and Symantec have been fiercely acquiring companies in order to meet shifting trends and emerging threats in the security space.

Smaller companies meanwhile have seemingly preferred a strategy of partnering in an attempt to reduce time to market with their own competitive layered solutions.