McAfee is bringing the first API integration for sensitive data detection, threat protection and activity monitoring capabilities to Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Thyaga Vasudevan, VP of Products at McAfee
Today, McAfee Enterprise is announcing that MVISION Cloud, part of their MVISION Unified Cloud Edge [UCE] secure access service edge (SASE) offering, now provides enhanced security coverage for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM applications. In particular, McAfee is highlighting the importance of their providing the first API integration for sensitive data detection, threat protection and activity monitoring capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
It has been an eventful year for McAfee, which announced the divestiture of their enterprise business to equity firm Symphony Technology Group [STG] in March for about $4 billion dollars, a deal which closed on July 27.
“McAfee consisted of both the consumer arm of the business, a well-oiled machine growing significantly because of Work From Home, and the enterprise arm, which sold security solutions to enterprise IT, which both being about the same size,” said Thyaga Vasudevan, VP of Products at McAfee.
“McAfee decided to carve out the enterprise arm to a buyer who wanted to get into a strong cloud security space, and that was STG,” Vasudevan said. “They had done previous investments in security, starting with RedSeal in 2019, and then acquiring RSA from Dell in September 2020. More recently, they announced the acquisition of FireEye’s products business in June, which is expected to close in Q4. It will become part of McAfee Enterprise as well [although FireEye’s Mandiant business is not part of the deal.] What it will be called and how It will be organized is still being worked out through.”
Vasudevan emphasized that the new McAfee is part of a much more aggressive cloud-focused organization.
“It is clear from STG that they are all about investing for growth,” he said. “They believe cloud security is on the cusp of hypergrowth. We also believe that this will super-accelerate our enterprise strategy, since the focus is purely on the enterprise side of the house, plus we now get the muscle of FireEye coming in. This has led to increased interest from cloud services partners like AWS and Microsoft.”
The MVISION UCE product that is the focus of today’s announcement went live in the early part of 2020.
“UCE delivers our unique SASE value proposition with a combination of secure web gateway, CASB, and private access,” Vasudevan said. “It’s a unified engine for SASE which provides unified data protection in cloud native environments at hyperscale. When our SASE is combined with our CNAPP [Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform] architecture, that’s what excited STG about McAfee Enterprise and encouraged them to bring their deep pockets to invest in it.”
Microsoft Dynamics CRM, now Dynamics 365, is part of the Microsoft cloud suite of products, which has seen significant enterprise momentum since they launched their cloud version some years back and then integrated it into the Microsoft 365 suite.
“We bring additional value to Dynamics 365 in the ability of our CASB to detect sensitive documents within business objects,” Vasudevan noted. “None of our competition can do this. Looking at files and messages is the easy part. The hard part is looking at content within a specific business object. When an organization is being audited for possible PII violations, the issue is not about information in files, but specific information inside a field, inside a business object. We can locate that, in real time, scanning the address to detect sensitive information, and can then delete any offending content. That’s a huge differentiation in this market.” Customers can set specific content policies, and then apply those policies across Dynamics 365 and other cloud apps like Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams.
The Go-to-Market motion for this will include both companies.
“We are working closely with the Dynamics team to launch the Go-to-Market, and our partner team is working with them very closely,” Vasudevan said. “We have spoken to a lot of channel partners about this. With many customers adopting Microsoft 365, and some of them Dynamics 365 as well, they want a single data protection policy across all cloud services that they can easily apply.”
