McAfee MVision Cloud Review

McAfee's new family of enterprise security products is called McAfee MVision Cloud and costs $30.16 per node per year. However, Mvision offers more than just endpoint protection and offers a layered security layer architecture backed by an underlying machine learning engine. While we found the architecture to be impressive, the emphasis on multiple products, each billed separately, means you'll probably spend a little more to meet all the features that are already part of the all-inclusive products.

However, MVision's approach allows for virtually any desired deployment model, be it entirely cloud-based, on-premises, or in a hybrid format. Although it is compatible with all major operating systems, including mobile devices, the system is very Windows 10 oriented and uses Windows Defender as the first level of defense for the endpoints used. As already mentioned, mobile operating systems are also supported. However, for full functionality, you must add MVision Mobile, which is an additional cost.

As soon as you log into your MVision account, you will be greeted by ePO Protection Workspace. This screen provides a high-level view of your environment and provides a summary of current and past threats, deployment status, and whether your environments are up to date with threat protection. Overall, it's well-designed, but we looked at the top dashboard interfaces that we liked the most in other products, including Vipre Endpoint Security Cloud and Sophos Intercept, another Editor's Choice winner. But before this screen can show anything useful, you need to add some devices. This is a simple process and can be done by clicking Implement Protection on the right and selecting the products you want to include. This will create a custom installer for that particular target machine that you can download and deploy.

After installing Agent and Endpoint Protection, you will need to wait a little while to take full advantage of MVision's Endpoint Protection. Since Windows Defender is the first line of defense, it will be the only line of defense during the rest of the product updates. This is important to consider in new deployments because there is a gap between the agent implementation and the maximum level of protection that MVision can provide.

The scan gives ePO a much friendlier face than previous McAfee products. Many of the confusing navigation twists in the old user interface are largely hidden and replaced by a simple user interface in the navigation bar at the top of the window. If you're looking for the old ways, you can still get there, but you'll have to check the navigation drop-down menu to find them.

Some important sections include Policy Manager, which includes not only Endpoint Protection but also all other McAfee products and some Windows Group Policies. especially Windows Defender. However, there are also several new options. Enabling endpoint protection has been made much easier, so you can now use the Recommended, High Protection, or Custom settings to speed up this part of the process. With "Custom" you get all the switches that you, as the primary user, want to optimize. However, for the most part, the recommended settings are fine.

A curiosity among the custom settings is that the trusted setting works the opposite of what you might expect. Low confidence means that they have little confidence that something is safe and therefore treat items with much more care. Usually "low confidence" means the opposite, but aside from awkward wording, we found the level of customization to be sufficient.

Relationships have been an area that McAfee has done well in the past and is still better than ever. Although, to our knowledge, little progress has been made in developing new reports, there has been no hiccup with the introduction of the new user interface. It's always a welcome relief, as new user interfaces tend to erase at least one or two favorite aspects of any old application.