RSA to Partner with McAfee and Privaris, Buy Valyd

RSA does not just host the biggest vendor-driven security event of the year. It also makes news of its own.

At its RSA Conference in San Francisco, RSA, the security division of EMC, announced Feb. 7 that it has signed an agreement with McAfee to work together on a security platform that will help its customers to provide more secure online banking.

The companies will combine McAfee’s consumer desktop platforms with RSA’s Adaptive Authentication offering to enable financial institutions to provide their customers with complete protection for their banking and online transactions.

RSA’s Adaptive Authentication platform helps to analyze factors that could affect a system’s security and provides the user with a device ID, an IP address, and other attributes that will confirm the account owner’s identity.

“By partnering with McAfee, we get the added benefit that their security suite knows the health of the machine and since they understand security, it is easy to collaborate to create this secure connection,” Marc Gaffan, director of marketing for Consumer Solutions for RSA, based in Bedford, Mass., told eWEEK.

Click here to read about the future of TPM technology as discussed at RSA.

RSA also announced that it has signed an agreement with Privaris, a high-security biometrics applications provider, in which Privaris will include RSA’s SecurID with its own PlusID security platform.

The SecurID platform offers two-factor authentication for logical access, while PlusID provides a personal security token that authenticates a user’s identity through fingerprints before granting access to computers, networks and Web sites.

Together, SecurID and PlusID will provide users with three authentication characteristics: a PlusID token, a one-time password generated by the RSA SecurID algorithm and a fingerprint.

“The partnership allows Privaris to provide the existing installed base of SecurID users with a solution that enhances security through biometric identity verification, without requiring them to change their existing infrastructure,” John Petze, CEO of Privaris, in Fairfax, Va., told eWEEK.

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The combined product offering will be available in the third quarter of 2007. The single quantity list price is $149.95

RSA also announced on Feb. 6 that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Valyd, an enterprise security application provider that has worked with a number of database management systems, including Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server and NCR Teradata. Valyd’s platforms are designed to help secure databases and file systems by encrypting data according to organizations’ policies.

The acquisition, not officially complete as of press time, calls for RSA to acquire all technological assets from Valyd, and upon closing, Valyd’s products will be immediately relaunched by RSA in the form of RSA Database Security Manager, an enterprise-class software platform that secures important data in database systems, and RSA File Security Manager, a platform that secures important information in files and folders.

According to Rick Welch, vice president and general manager of Data Security at RSA, the acquisition of Valyd will help RSA because it is currently unable to warrant or permit application changes, which is an issue when it comes to databases, file systems and encryption.

“This expansion of the RSA Enterprise Data Protection strategy will help organizations tackle the deployment of technologies like encryption more efficiently and with greater control and predictability by simplifying their management over time regardless of where they must be employed,” Welch told eWEEK.

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