McAfee has unveiled Email and Web Security Appliance 5.5, a traffic management and security product for small and mid-sized businesses.

The security firm said that the appliance offers comprehensive security and control in one place, thereby reducing system administration requirements.

New features include the integration of McAfee's Artemis and TrustedSource tools that can be used to assess and identify global threats, and clustering and load balancing tools to improve performance and boost scalability.

"These appliances provide customers with email and web usage policy enforcement capabilities, compliance tools, informative dashboards and comprehensive reporting," said Dave Macey, general manager of McAfee's Network Security business unit.

"McAfee's combined intelligence capabilities work by accumulating data from millions of sensors, creating a real-time profile of all suspicious activity and content, and then watching for deviations based on expected behaviour."

Other new features include improved installation wizards, designed to reduce and simplify installation, and a number of content policy wizards which can be used to set limits on use and enforce enterprise rules and regulations on web and mail usage.

These can also be used to remove the risk of false positives and configuration errors. URL filtering has also been improved, meaning that firms can lock out sites in up to 90 different categories.

The McAfee Email and Web Security Appliance is due for release later this quarter.