Organizations sacrifice security for network performance: McAfee

A recent report released by McAfee shows that many organizations choose network performance over security.

The survey report says an alarming number of organizations are now disabling advanced firewall features in order to avoid significant network performance degradation.

While 60 percent of the 504 IT professionals surveyed, 60 percent stated that the design of their company’s network was driven by security.

However, more than one-third of respondents admitted to turning off firewall features or declining to enable certain security functions in an effort to increase the performance of their networks.

firewall

“It is unfortunate that turning off important firewall features because of network performance concerns has started to become common practice,” said Pat Calhoun, general manager of Network Security at McAfee, part of Intel Security.

“At McAfee we believe this is unacceptable. Companies simply should not have to make that kind of trade-off,” Calhoun added.

The most common features disabled by network administrators include deep packet inspection (DPI), anti-spam, anti-virus, and VPN access.

DPI detects malicious activity within regular network traffic and prevents intrusions by blocking offending traffic automatically before any damage occurs.

Many organizations choose to turn-off DPI because of the high demands it places on network resources, yielding upwards of a 40 percent degradation of throughput, according to third-party research firm, Miercom.

With the number of confirmed data breaches climbing more than 200 percent in 2014 over the previous year, McAfee  warns organizations must embrace advanced protections available to them with next generation firewalls.

McAfee Next Generation Firewall has sustained one of the highest firewall throughputs in Miercom’s testing, McAfee claims.  Competing products tested exhibited an average of 75 percent or more performance degradation for DPI, anti-virus and application control when enabled.
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