SAN FRANCISCO — McAfee went big at RSA Conference 2020. In addition to the security vendor’s CTO Steve Grobman delivering an opening-day keynote, McAfee also announced a deal to buy browser isolation startup Light Point Security, rolled out new secure access service edge (SASE) and cloud-native infrastructure capabilities, and launched a global managed detection and response (MDR) platform with DXC Technology as its first strategic MDR partner.

Let’s start with SASE. This is a relatively new segment — Gartner coined the term late last year. It’s a type of architecture that consolidates networking and security capabilities into an edge cloud-delivered service, and since Gartner came up with the sassy name, traditional networking and security vendors alike have been quick to board the SASE train. McAfee’s doing this with Unified Cloud Edge (UCE), which it says unifies data and threat protection from the device to the cloud. It will be available in March, and it brings together McAfee’s cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG), and data loss prevention (DPL) capabilities in McAfee’s Mvision cloud-native platform.

“If you look at the SASE model, Garner is saying all networking and security will be delivered from the cloud. We saw that coming years ago when we bought Skyhigh and went all in on the cloud,” said McAfee CMO Vittorio Viarengo in an interview at RSA Conference 2020. Skyhigh was a CASB pioneer that McAfee acquired in early 2018, and Viarengo came to McAfee by way of the Skyhigh acquisition.

“If you look at SASE, it really has two main buckets: one is the transport, and the other is the security area,” he added. “We believe we have the most complete, security capabilities for the SASE world.”

It’s also adding to these capabilities with Light Point Security, and once that acquisition closes McAfee plans to integrate Light Point Security’s browser isolation technology into its secure web gateway and SASE architecture.

“We have our heritage [technology] on the device, and now with Skyhigh and Unified Cloud Edge we protect the cloud, and data moving in and out of the cloud, but there’s still one area where malware can come down onto the device, which is the browser,” Viarengo said. “Light Point lets us to run that browser on a sandbox in the cloud so nothing can ever come down on to the device. Now we have really airtight security from the device onto the cloud.”

Also today, McAfee announced updates to its Mvision platform to help organizations better protect their cloud-native infrastructure and applications. It calls this Mvision Cloud Native Infrastructure Security, and it integrates cloud security posture management (CSPM), cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) and container security technologies integrated into one security management experience.

These capabilities, which are available now, build on container security services that McAfee first announced in December. They use NanoSec’s zero trust capabilities for container-based deployments in cloud environments. McAfee bought that container security startup in August.

And Viarengo said it further illustrates how McAfee is committed to doing the difficult engineering work to integrate its acquisitions into a unified platform. “That’s one of our biggest differentiators,” he said. “We have re-engineered this technology so that it’s an integrated platform. So you have a single place to set your policies, and a single place to see all your incidents.”

Finally, McAfee also launched a global managed detection and response (MDR) platform. DXC Technology is McAfee’s first MDR partner, and via the Mvision platform DXC will provide managed threat hunting, forensics and investigations, and endpoint threat detection services.

“One trend that we’ve seen from customers is the first step is to move to the cloud. It’s a foregone conclusion,” Viarengo said. “And then the next step is who is going to help us manage all of this in the cloud? This partnership allows us to give a turnkey solution to our customers where we have a platform hosted in the cloud and somebody operates it for the customers.”

He said McAfee plans to extend this managed service approach across its other cloud products such as CASB and web gateway as well.