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McAfee, one of the world’s leading cybersecurity companies, today announced widescale adoption of the Data Exchange Layer (DXL), including interoperability with Cisco Systems, the world’s largest provider of networking and enterprise security solutions, and new collaborations through the McAfee® Security Innovation Alliance, the industry’s premier technology partnering program, demonstrating the industry move to collaborative, open and integrated security.

“We must empower security teams to stop spending their time on tedious integrations and manual tasks and instead, focus on defending against adversaries,” said Raja Patel, general manager corporate products at McAfee. “Organizations should focus on maximizing the value of their environment with solutions that integrate, as opposed to layering new technologies that don’t speak to each other. Collaboration like we are doing with Cisco, IBM Security and others throughout the security industry is critical to closing information gaps, breaking silos and providing the visibility we need to protect our most important assets from cybercriminals.”

Since its launch in 2016, the OpenDXL initiative has accelerated enterprise use of DXL, and available service offerings. The OpenDXL initiative has shown increasing adoption through enterprises developing with it, dozens of solutions completed via the software developer kit (SDK), published to the GitHub source code repository and OpenDXL.com, a dedicated open source web community.

Increasing industry momentum, DXL and Cisco pxGrid, the open security information grid by Cisco, now work together to share threat event context and enable automation between the network and endpoint. With the two fabrics interoperating, organizations can now drive integrations with security solutions from hundreds of vendors. Furthermore, through the OpenDXL initiative, integration and orchestration are now extended to open source and enterprise applications.

Together McAfee and Cisco are delivering:

Industry’s Largest Open Security Fabric: With close to 100 integrated partners between them, DXL and pxGrid together create a universal, unified and responsive security infrastructure for threat detection and response.

Automated Threat Mitigation: Automated processes can cross previously siloed tools, and link endpoint, network and security operation domains, closing security gaps that prevent efficient and effective threat management.

Improved Decision Precision: Bi-directional data flow enriches integrated applications with detailed information, allowing analysts visibility into critical data such as what is on their network, current security posture, privilege levels, and more.

“Industry and enterprise leaders have long called for greater visibility and efficacy in security operations. Cisco pxGrid and DXL interoperability mark the first time this has been achieved at such scale due to the wide cross-section of customers we each serve and the many that we share,” said Jeff Reed, senior vice president, product management, Security Business Group, Cisco. “We have found that many organizations struggle to integrate up to 50 security products from a like number of security vendors, resulting in security gaps that leave them vulnerable. Defenders now have access to the industry’s most extensive and diverse set of services between network, endpoint and security operations. This collaboration between Cisco and McAfee creates great value and eases the security effort for customers.”

On the anniversary of the OpenDXL initiative, McAfee has released DXL 4.0 and new open source tools that provide an enterprise-class environment for developers to facilitate effective use and accelerate creation.

Newly released DXL features include:

Easy pxGrid Integration: Simple download includes all software required to connect DXL and pxGrid and set automated policies to respond to potential threats.

Automated Incident Response: McAfee® ePolicy Orchestrator® (McAfee® ePO™) automatically reacts to threat events, sending data to DXL to disseminate amongst connected products for action.

Improved Management: Simplified client provisioning and process updates with new DXL ePO™ extension and client enhancements.

New contributions to the OpenDXL community:

Simplified Development and Testing: New interactive development environment and standalone DXL Broker lets users set up a working DXL infrastructure and development environment in five minutes or less.

Simplified pxGrid Integration: New OpenDXL pxGrid Python client is optimized to support interactions between OpenDXL services and pxGrid.