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Intel Security sunsets SaaS email security products

The artist formerly known as McAfee wants you in a new and more modern cloud

Intel Security is decommissioning bits of its software-as-a-service armoury.

The newly-re-named outfit (We have nothing – NOTHING! to do with that oddball John McAfee) has emailed customers of its McAfee SaaS Endpoint Products and SaaS Email Protection and Archiving to let them know that as of January 11th next year it will stop selling the products. Come January 11th, 2019, they products won't be supported.

The latter products will operate until January 11, 2021 if you really must keep using them, but 11 January 2019 is its preferred date for you to stop relying on the email scanning and archiving services. Making the move is probably a good idea because the FAQ for the end of life announcement says Intel Security is killing them off for the following reasons:

“We are working to create an integrated system that delivers faster protection, detection and correction. To create that security system, we are investing in solutions for the endpoint, cloud, threat detection, and management that will ensure the security of the endpoint and cloud and all data traversing in between. Increasing our investments in these critical areas required exiting other product areas such as McAfee email security solutions.”

Which sounds great, until you ask yourself that if the new service will “ensure” security, what's the old one doing?

But we digress.

The McAfee SaaS Endpoint Products comprise a cloudy “Browser Protection and Content Filtering” offering, “AntiVirus/Anti-Spyware Protection” and “Firewall Protection”.

The FAQ (PDF) for this lot of code says Intel Security is killing off the products because “selected component technologies are going EOL, making the offering no longer compelling to customers.” McAfee Enterprise Mobility Manager and McAfee SaaS Email Protection are the soon-to-be-dead components ushering their relatives to an early grave.

Two products replace the death-row code.

McAfee Endpoint Security is billed as “a collaborative protection framework that replaces the functionality of McAfee SaaS Endpoint Protection technology.” The McAfee ePO Cloud is the other new product and is said to provide “ a single 'pane of glass' for highly scalable, flexible, and automated centralized management and enforcement of security management policies.”

Users of the current SaaS suite will be “transitioned” to the new products. Intel Security's FAQ says customers will be contacted with details on how to upgrade and that there's all sorts of fun setting up new accounts and re-installing software ahead for customers.

No extended support will be offered, but those brave few with support contracts going past the EOL day will get special treatment of a to-be-determined sort.

Intel Security's thinking on this end-of-life process is interesting, because lots of SaaS operators talk up the fact that upgrades just happen and all you need to do is lie back and enjoy the enhanced feature set. Customers of this code are being asked to do rather more, in the name of a step-change in functionality.

Reader “DB”, who tipped us off to the change, wondered “why Intel is getting out of this product line and what else is going on a McAfee after the intel purchase some years ago.” Well we now know that Intel's not exiting the business but we can have a guess at an answer to the second half of the question by suggesting that Intel might just have found that McAfee's wares either aren't particularly fit for the future or don't lend themselves to the scale at which things need to operate in these increasingly cloudy days. ®

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