McAfee to Acquire NitroSecurity

McAfee today announced that it has agreed to acquire NitroSecurity, a privately held provider of high-performance security information and event management (SIEM) solutions.

The company’s founders and roots come from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, giving it extensive experience with critical infrastructures in the energy sector, creating a sweet spot for the Portsmouth, NH-based company in a sector that has come into the spotlight following Stuxnet and a general rise in concern over critical infrastructure security.

Following the completion of this proposed acquisition, McAfee expects that NitroSecurity’s technology, combined with its own security management capabilities, will give organizations greater visibility into their enterprise endpoint assets, underlying network infrastructure, specific security threats and risks and system vulnerabilities across their entire IT environment.

NitroSecurity’s position and expertise in the SIEM market will help McAfee expand its Risk and Compliance and Global Threat Intelligence capabilities. NitroSecurity’s SIEM solution already integrates with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO™) and can provide customers with a single security platform for event analysis and management.

“McAfee has taken another significant step toward this goal with the proposed acquisition of NitroSecurity. With NitroSecurity’s technology and talent, McAfee can expand its reach into new markets, secure new platforms and strengthen its hold as the leader in the security risk management market,” said Stuart McClure, general manager and senior vice president of the Risk and Compliance business unit at McAfee.

The companies expect the acquisition to close before the end of 2011. Following the closing, it is expected that the NitroSecurity team will be incorporated McAfee’s Risk and Compliance business unit, headed by McClure.

The news of the acquisition comes on the same day that IBM announced plans to acquire Q1 Labs, another leading SIEM vendor. These two acquisitions, combined with HP’s $1.5 billion acquisition of ArcSight just over a year ago, make it pretty clear that despite some recent arguments, SIEM isn’t dead.

Be sure to check out recent SecurityWeek columns on critical infrastructure security from Eric Knapp, NitroSecurity’s Director of Critical Infrastructure Markets.