Anna Forrester
A recent McAfee report says that a majority of information technology professionals surveyed noted security as the focus of their companies’ network design, but some forego security functions in order to emphasize network performance.
The company said Wednesday the “Network Performance and Security” report showed the challenges that IT organizations face in balancing network security and performance.
“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, now part of Intel‘s security business.
“Companies simply should not have to make that kind of trade-off.”
In the report, which McAfee presented at the FOCUS 14 conference, approximately 33 percent of the 504 respondents said they disabled security features such as deep packet inspection, anti-spam, anti-virus and access to virtual private networks.
McAfee said a report from research firm Miercom indicated firewall throughput degradation as the reason many network administrators turn off DPI.
The company noted that its Next Generation Firewall offering works to sustain throughput while DPI is enabled.
