Fun Facts: ECS stood up and managed the first security operations center at the White House. Today, ECS manages the world’s largest McAfee installation—employing just about every solution we make—for the U.S. Army.
ECS is more than a McAfee Platinum Partner: they’ve built their entire security solution around McAfee products. The company’s unique offering to Enterprise, military, intelligence and federal civilian combines their award-winning managed services powered by McAfee, and high-level competencies across the Amazon Web Services (AWS) product suite.
ECS has earned service delivery certifications for every McAfee product, participating regularly in betas and trials of new software with active input into the development of new products. Its AWS bona fides are equally ambitious: ECS is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, an Audited Managed Service Partner, and one of the world’s largest AWS resellers.
For the past 17 years, ECS (formerly InfoReliance) has built a managed-services offering that focuses on delivering custom solutions for clients in regulated industries such as government and defense, but the company also has a large and growing roster of high-profile enterprise and commercial customers. ECS focuses its security solutions around the threat defense lifecycle, applying not only McAfee products but complementary solutions from McAfee Security Innovation Alliance.
“Our choice to provide a single-vendor security platform and deliver McAfee at scale is one of the things that makes us unique,” remarks Andy Woods, Director of Managed Cybersecurity at ECS. “It means our organization can have a depth of expertise that’s frankly unmatched by anyone else in the industry. We also believe it’s the best way to be technology-heavy and people-light, and to automate as much of the cybersecurity lifecycle as we can.”
The McAfee Virtual Network Security Platform (vNSP) and its tight synergy with AWS is a large focus of ECS’s business. Tim Gonda, ECS security engineer and vNSP expert, explains: “We feel it is important to recognize that as part of the AWS shared responsibility model, it is up to us to ensure the security of our virtual networks. We leverage vNSP as a way to augment the security of native AWS capabilities. We are able to establish more flexible controls for protecting our own workloads, as well as providing custom-tailored solutions to our clients.”
In one example of a customer’s virtual private cloud (VPC) deployment, the ECS team launched a vNSP controller into the VPC, and deployed sensors per subnet. The application service also included the lightweight, host-based traffic redirector. “One of the biggest differentiators of vNSP versus other products is that it allows us to monitor internal VPC traffic, as well as traffic leaving the VPC, in an extremely lightweight framework,” Gonda comments. “In this example, we managed the lateral traffic within the VPC, as well as traffic going out to the internet, while providing custom filters and rules looking for specific threats on the wire.”
The application of vNSP with AWS-driven VPCs is just one example of ECS’s fearless innovation in today’s marketplace. Woods notes, “We’re proud of our internally developed intellectual properties, such as our iRamp billing system. We developed one of the very first DXL-enabled technologies within the partner community. We were also early adopters of integrated security through McAfee ePO, born out of a need to support clients in regulated industries.”
Woods concludes, “Our clients are focused on value management of their cybersecurity spend and how we can help them reduce their risk not only today but into the future. We deliver security customized security outcomes for every organization we work with. We’re confident in McAfee’s ability to scale along with core competencies on the endpoint, whether on-premises or in the cloud. The connected infrastructure is a key differentiator for us as we deliver managed services to customers across all verticals. For us, ‘Together is Power’ means being able to solve our clients’ cybersecurity problems in the most powerful manner possible, through a single platform of connected technologies.”
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Article Link: https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/business/mcafee-vnsp-and-aws-are-winning-combination-for-enterprise-and-federal-customers/