Middle East behind on compliance warns McAfee

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The Middle East is lagging behind on compliance in part due to a lack of regulations, security vendor McAfee has warned.

The vendor said that a comprehensive framework of laws is needed to ensure that more Middle East enterprises adopt security and compliance standards in their organisations soon.

"In the Middle East compliance is not as key a priority as it should be," Faisal Iftikhar Khan, senior security consultant for the Middle East at McAfee, said.

"The US leads the world with laws and measures to ensure that companies function within set standards. The region is still missing on such defined regulations which could help speed up the process of standards adoption across organisations," he added.

He added that such laws could be some time in coming to the region.

The vendor has launched a new policy auditor and remediation manager solution, named Hercules, which it claims will help enterprises prepare early for eventual compliance.

"With Hercules, enterprises can enforce compliance internally across employee systems. They can also use existing security policy, compare that with international standards and fill in the gaps needed to reach full compliance easily," Patrick Hayati, regional director, Middle East and Mediterranean for McAfee (pictured), said.

McAfee has also launched a new solution for data loss designed to help enterprise prevent the movement of internal and confidential data from internal networks.

Data loss is a burning issue for enterprises in the Middle East and though not many report incidents, information leakage occurs alarmingly regularly in most organisations in the region, according to the vendor.

McAfee said that by using the solution, administrators can restrict the modification, copying and the general movement through portable devices of the company's confidential data from client systems.

"It is an intelligent solution that protects data based on contexts that are set by the IT administrator and therefore the information is secure even when a person tries to copy it across different file formats," Khan said.

The solution also tracks employee attempts to modify, move or copy documents and reports it back to the IT administrator. It can be deployed to cover desktops and laptops and inclusion of other mobile devices like personal digital assistant (PDAs) will happen soon, Khan said.

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