McAfee to clean C&W customer data traffic

Cable & Wireless has signed up US security giant McAfee to clean up the data which travels over its network, removing much of the security burden from its customers.

In the past all data has been piped into businesses, irrespective of origin or validity, and companies have relied upon security solutions at the gateway and on their desktops.

But the welter of phishing scams, spam and viruses travelling over exchanges means the processes of cleaning data within the perimeter has become unworkable and uneconomical to the business, with the majority of bandwidth used simply for carrying unwanted traffic.

Filtering out the spam and the unwanted data before it even reaches the perimeter and reclaiming that lost bandwidth for the proper use of the business is a no-brainer, according to Greg Day, security consultant at McAfee.

And Day claims that with bandwidth now a commodity the service providers must add whatever value they can to their offering.

"Selling bandwidth is a commodity now. There's very little value in it so companies must create value through whatever they can bundle in there," he said. "More and more customers are looking for increased security."

Mark Hanvey, CSO at Cable & Wireless, told silicon.com: "This is something which has been on our radar for some time."

He added it is as much an improvement aimed at retaining existing customers as attracting new ones, in a market where service providers are increasingly looking at security as a powerful value-add.

Hanvey acknowledge a number of rivals will also be looking at rolling out similar offerings.

However, he told silicon.com there is a fine line that service providers must tread when it comes to publicising the fact they monitor in-bound and out-bound traffic, albeit only scanning it for the purposes of filtering out malware and spam.

"You have to be careful," he said. "Customers have a right to privacy and the privacy of their data. There is a very fine line to tread."

This deal with McAfee follows another strong endorsement for the managed security service model last week when the company signed a deal with Postini.

However, McAfee's Day said this does not represent an about-face on his employer's heritage of desktop antivirus.

"This is not so much a turnaround but more a complementary solution. We're not saying people don't now need a desktop solution because there are many other ways people can plug data in and a variety of threats."

Day believes it is also important the scanning and filtering is being done at the network level - or "in the cloud".

A number of ISPs have recently rolled out security offerings which require the customer to download applications but Day believes this approach is open to end-user error.

"The vision behind this service was to take away all the pressure from the customers," said Day, who believes it would be too easy for end-users to forget to install upgrades, patches or applications which their service provider was offering for download.