What McAfee's acquisition of Stonesoft means for the companies and their customers

Intel-owned McAfee has completed its acquisition of Finnish firewall company Stonesoft, following a $389m deal announced in May, but what does this mean for the companies and their customers?

McAfee acquires a modern firewall technology to bolster and round out its network security offerings, while Stonesoft gets the backing of a strong brand, including access to McAfee's global customers, technical and sales support, and distribution networks and channel.

This is fairly important for Stonesoft because despite the strength of its technology, a lack of presence in North America may have stifled its growth, according to Javvad Malik, senior analyst, enterprise security practice, at 451 Research.

"With the McAfee brand behind it, we could see Stonesoft become a bigger player in the market," he told Computer Weekly.

As far as McAfee is concerned, the acquisition should mean that it will be able to expand its share of the enterprise market, with enterprises currently spending around 25% of their annual budget on network security, according to Forrester.

The enterprise network security equipment market is forecast to grow at a 7% compound annual growth rate during the next five years to reach $11.4bn by 2017, according to Gartner. The analyst firm predicts particularly high growth in the next-generation firewall market – rising from $500m in 2012 to $4.6bn in 2016.

Network security has become even more important in light of the fact that a fast-growing mobile market and a declining PC market is likely to have a negative impact on McAfee’s core desktop security business.

While helping McAfee capitalise on market growth and demand, the move also fits into the security firm’s Security Connected strategy and vision.

“From a McAfee security standpoint, the purchase makes sense. McAfee has been diversifying outside of simple endpoint antivirus onto the network, and this purchase fits in nicely,” said Malik.

“However, it is slightly less clear how this fits in with Intel’s grand plan of things,” he said.

Ashish Patel, Stonesoft’s UK-based regional director, said the acquisition demonstrates that large companies such as McAfee and Intel understand that “there are groundbreaking technologies out there that need to be brought into the mix”.

Such acquisitions, he said, help encourage innovation by bringing new funding into an industry.

But what about the customers?

According to Tyler Shields, senior analyst at Forrester, how customers will be affected depends largely on how McAfee integrates the Stonesoft products into its current offerings.

“This will determine the long-term effectiveness of the acquisition,” he told Computer Weekly.

Stonesoft's advanced evasion technique (AET) research could be used to bolster the entire McAfee product line, said Shields, while its next-generation firewall offering will likely be seen as a market upgrade to the McAfee Sidewinder product.

The AET expertise will provide added protection for McAfee customers against new and emerging threats that combine several different known evasion methods to create a new technique that is delivered over several layers of the network simultaneously.

“McAfee is going for a unified next-generation security architecture play with this acquisition, setting its sights on the big players such as Cisco and Juniper,” he said.

In turn, McAfee’s expertise and cloud-based Global Threat Intelligence (GTI) service will give combined customers “unparalleled security”, said Stonesoft’s Patel.

Patel said the GTI capability is one of McAfee’s core strengths and will be one of the technologies that will be added to Stonesoft’s portfolio to take its products ahead by “leaps and bounds”.

Combined customers will also benefit from having one supplier that can provide visibility on the endpoint and across the network layer.

“This can help in having one view and one product to manage malicious or suspicious activity across both channels,” he said.

However, Malik pointed out that unlike the US, where if you acquire over 50% of a company you own it, in Finland it is nearer 90%.

“It will probably take a few months before McAfee will be able to properly start stitching together some of the seams,” he said.

For Modern Jurors, Being On A Case Means Being Offline

More courts are asking jurors to avoid social media services and tools that have become an integral part of modern life, like Twitter, Facebook, email, texting, instant messaging and Internet research.
More courts are asking jurors to avoid social media services and tools that have become an integral part of modern life, like Twitter, Facebook, email, texting, instant messaging and Internet research.

In the Mercer County Courthouse in Trenton, N.J., John Saunders, a jury manager, spends his weekdays shepherding potential jurors. Much of what he tells them regards the paraphernalia of 21st century life: cellphones, tablets and laptops. These are OK to use in the waiting room, he tells them. "We realize life does not stop."

But in the courtroom, it's all phones off. Laptops and iPads stay with Saunders, and jurors are given a tag to reclaim their items. "Unlike the airport, when you return, your item will be there, and no baggage charge guaranteed," he says.

While jurors were once warned not to discuss with others the cases they were hearing, warnings to jurors in today's social media age have become much more explicit. Increasingly, jurors are hearing about what they should not
do with the devices that connect them to the world.
In New Jersey, judges like Travis Francis, the assignment judge in Middlesex County, have adopted model instructions to jurors that sound like something out of a Best Buy catalog.

"Do not use any electronic device," he tells them, "such as the telephone, cell or smartphone, BlackBerry, iPhone, PDA computer, the Internet, email, any text or instant message service, any Internet chat room, blog or website such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Twitter to communicate to anyone any information about the case."

Doing any research or investigating of the case on your own is also forbidden here, as is "visiting the scene" virtually. "Jurors are specifically instructed not to use Google Earth or any other similar utility to visit the scene of an accident or crime," Francis says.

Putting Modern Communication On Hold

These lengthy lists of digital don'ts grow out of a conflict in modern life: Jury duty requires a juror to limit his or her communications with others. To many 21st century Americans, those limits might feel like solitary confinement.

Paula Hannaford-Agor, who directs of the Center for Jury Studies in Williamsburg, Va., says that in an age when everyone's used to instant digital information — finding a restaurant, paying a bill, checking a bank balance — "it's very difficult and really counterintuitive for many jurors" to be told they must refrain from using the Internet to research a case.

But how often does a juror actually visit a crime scene on Google Earth, tweet about the case she's on or look up the filings? Hannaford-Agor says a 2010 Reuters study found that only 90 verdicts were challenged on the basis of juror digital disobedience between 1999 and 2010. But, she notes, those are the only reported cases or instances that were admitted to. Now, Hannaford-Agor says she typically hears about one case a week in which jurors looked up legal terms on the Web or shared their jury duty experience on social media.

Those kinds of communications have sparked various new rules and procedures across the country. In New Jersey, one case involving jury deliberations in a 2011 Bergen County drug trial made a big impact on judges all over the state, including Superior Court Judge Robert Billmeier, who hears criminal cases in Trenton.

"It was actually the foreperson of the jury who got on the Internet despite the judge's instructions not to," Billmeier says. He found information about a minimum prison term that he thought would pertain to the defendant if he was found guilty. "As it turned out, his research was inaccurate," Billmeier says, but that information led to a deadlocked jury and a mistrial. The juror was fined $500.

Where's The Line?

Billmeier has since adopted a juror pledge. Jurors must agree to not engage in any online research or communication pertaining to their trial — and jurors must sign under penalty of perjury. That, he says, "brings home to them how important this instruction is not to get on the Internet, not to use social media, to follow the court's instructions — or there could be adverse consequences."

But what about a tweet that reveals nothing more than what one might tell a spouse, like, "I'm on a jury in a drug case," for example?

The problem, Billmeier says, is that a tweet is an invitation to a conversation. And while such a tweet may not necessarily get someone dismissed or get a verdict overturned, the lines between unacceptable and acceptable tweets are likely to get less clear, says Hannaford-Agor.

"We're starting to hear, begrudgingly, a lot more discussion about under what circumstances is a juror's conduct of going online or posting something actually harmful error," she says.

Meaning that, with social media so integral to our lives, there are some circumstances of jurors going digital that society may simply have to accept as harmless.