MCI unveils new security portfolio

Keying off its emergence from Chapter 11 last week, MCI announced a spate of new managed security services and a partnership with VeriSign today in an effort to attract a broader range of business customers.

The carrier named off a portfolio of managed firewall, vulnerability scanning, intrusion detection, anti-virus and anti-spamming services, targeted at not only its traditional enterprise customer base, but also smaller-sized businesses. All of the services are either available now or by May either as a whole package or in individual components.

"MCI has been in the security business intrinsically for the last several years," said Tom Walton, vice president of product management for MCI’s hosting and security service division. "What we’re doing now is focusing on a total solution, instead of just on individual components on the network edge."

The announcement builds off of several new offers MCI has made in the last few months while still in bankruptcy. In addition to building out its managed VPN services over the last year, it launched earlier this month anti-fraud protection and personal firewall services as well as began supporting extensible application protocol (EAP) password scrambling and secure socket layer connections over its remote access suite. MCI earlier this year began beefing up its denial-of-service attack prevention applications and offering strict SLAs to its customers against such attacks.

VeriSign will step in to provide a new authentication service for MCI customers and offer additional consulting and custom security platforms on a customer-by-customer basis. MCI is contracting with MessageLabs to filter customers’ e-mail for spam and viruses. MCI’s in-house vulnerability scanning and threat detection and prevention services will offer customers varying degrees of active or passive protection against hacking.

After emerging from bankruptcy last week, CEO Michael Capellas announced a new growth strategy focusing on creating new IP-based managed services which it could up-sell to its existing customer base while going after new business. Of the four major areas into which MCI plans to push, Capellas said, two would be managed services and network security.