McAfee has announced a new security management platform, enabling businesses to manage security from a single console and offering compliance products from multiple vendors, other than McAfee.

Called ePolicy Orchestrator 4.0 (ePO), the platform will be available September 25th free to McAfee customers with an existing maintenance contract.

The growth of security threats and regulation needs in recent years has made it essential for firms to have full time administration of a number of different security products needed to secure an IT environment. By reporting and auditing on third party products, ePO will streamline the need for a process that uses large numbers of staff to administer the different solutions, McAfee said in a report.

With ePO, 37 per cent of staff time will be saved on managing security and compliance and costs of managing security operations will be reduced by 62 per cent, according to Insight Express, a third party research group.

The market has demanded a product to increase the efficiency of monitoring security systems and to create a single point of focus, said Greg Day, a McAfee analyst. McAfee has been the only vendor to respond to this business need and, in doing this, has made the ladder “ever taller” for McAfee’s competitors, who are still developing client security tools, said Day. McAfee has enjoyed this lead for five years, he said.

With this “next generation of security and compliance management,” IT managers will have increased visibility and control of security threats, Day added. Senior management can access data in a useful format giving them all the information they need to-hand, rather than traditionally interviewing staff on each different remit or analysing raw data reports.

“Currently, most companies have too many agents and management consoles to administer their environments efficiently. By consolidating with ePolicy Orchestrator, customers could significantly improve and simplify management and compliance,” said Chris Christiansen, program vice president at IDC.

McAfee has launched the Security Innovation Alliance, a program which will provide tools, including application programming interfaces and software development kits, to help third party companies integrate with ePO.