Among the countless product announcements and partnership unveilings at Cloud Expo East 2012 this week in New York came a sizeable one from one of the biggest named exhibitors, McAfee (News - Alert), as the company unveiled new enhancements to its security platform for the cloud.

The McAfee Cloud Security Platform provides a framework that allows organizations to extend their security and policy enforcement into the cloud by securing the three primary channels of traffic – email, Web and identity. And for the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, Cloud Expo was a great chance to shed light on its recent cloud enhancements.

“What we are doing is helping to secure communication between an organization and the cloud,” Anne Aarness, manager of product marketing and network security for McAfee, told TMCnet at Cloud Expo this afternoon. “Cloud security is becoming more and more important especially as people utilize the Web side of things.  As they use the Web more and more, it’s so important that they secure it.”

From companies using Facebook (News - Alert) for business to others relying on non-traditional business sites to conduct business, cloud security is becoming perhaps more important than ever before as employee exposure to the Web increases exponentially each day.

The updates to the McAfee Cloud Security Platform focus on enhanced security for cloud-based interactions through continued integration between the products, innovative context-based policy support and Web protection for mobile workers. By coupling McAfee Global Threat Intelligence with the McAfee Cloud Security Platform, the solution is able to provide real-time protection and correlate data across all threat vectors—file, Web, email and network which allows it to protect customers before attacks occur, according to officials.

Among the updates to the McAfee Cloud Security Platform are: tighter integration; enhanced protection and simplified management; integrated Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities, which are now available in McAfee Email Protection and McAfee Web Gateway (News - Alert); new Web reporting for McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator platform; and Hybrid Web Protection deployment support.

The enhanced cloud offering also includes a new component, a lightweight agent that people can install on laptops for mobile users which redirects traffic to a Web protection solution.

“Primarily what it does is redirect Web traffic to our SaaS (News - Alert) or cloud solution,” Aarness said. “Oftentimes when employees take laptops out they connect to Wi-Fi, their laptops are vulnerable. This agent helps extend their protection outside of their traditional corporate network.”

One of the main ways that McAfee continues to maintain its competitive advantage is by remaining focused on security, in particular. In fact, whenever you hear about McAfee’s latest applications, they are always focused around security.

“That’s really how we maintain our focus; we don’t get distracted,” Aarness said. “It’s got to be security related and work into everything.”

Moreover, McAfee has a dedicated team of hundreds of researchers that do nothing but look for viruses, study viruses and understand malware and malware trends. Those employees are the ones responsible for building McAfee’s security solutions and keeping the company competitive.

While at Cloud Expo this week, McAfee is focused on not only spreading the word about its recent cloud enhancements, but also on educating the market on the fact that McAfee is more than just an antivirus company. Conversely, whether someone uses McAfee at home as a consumer or in the office as an organization, McAfee has a comprehensive product offering.

“When you think security, think McAfee but also think about our network, your data center, your Web and email traffic, and the other areas you really want to bring security to beyond the endpoint,” Aarness said.

So what can we expect from McAfee moving forward?

“You can expect to hear more joint collaboration between Intel (News - Alert) and McAfee and us coming out with some more innovative products,” Aarness concluded. “We are really continuing to enhance security – keeping one, two, three steps ahead of our security problems.”