McAfee Achieves Cloud Security Vision

(Pictured above: McAfee’s Chris Young on stage at McAfee’s MPower Security Summit in Las Vegas, Oct. 17.)

MCAFEE MPOWER — In 2016, McAfee CEO Chris Young committed to going big in cloud and becoming cloud-native.

At this week’s MPower Security Summit in Las Vegas, Young said his company has realized that vision with its acquisition of Skyhigh Networks, a provider of cloud access security broker (CASB) software, and its Mvision product portfolio. About 3,000 partners and customers are attending the conference.

Also during the event, Ken McCray, McAfee’s head of channel sales and operations for the Americas, said his company is going to rebuild its partner program, and is seeking input from partners about what will most benefit them.

Mvision is a cloud-native suite that allows customers to deploy security on their terms as they move to the cloud.

New additions to Mvision were announced Wednesday:

• Mvision EDR (endpoint detection response), which provides guided investigation, on-demand data collection and centralized management.
• Mvision Cloud, which McAfee gained through SkyHigh, offers a single point of visibility, comprehension and control across the cloud services an organization uses. Organizations can set consistent data and threat-protection policies across their entire SaaS/IaaS/PaaS spectrum.
• ePO unified data protection, which offers users a single-pane-of-glass experience when it comes to managing all data loss prevention (DLP) incidents and reporting via McAfee ePO.

“We now offer an industry-leading solution that protects workloads, data and users across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS as you move your infrastructure, data and users to the cloud,” Young said. “Mvision not only captures our vision, but includes your vision. It provides data protection as well as threat defense, from device all the way through the cloud. This approach has been what has brought us to this point in time.”

New partner opportunities afforded by Mvision include managed EDR, threat hunting and forensics, he said. Also, partners can offer managed CASB, he said.

McAfee’s long-term vision is “DLP everywhere; we cover you from all devices and cloud,” Young said.

Minerva Labs “very much believes in the Mvision promise” for end-to-end security in a connected world, from device to cloud, said Sharron Malaver, its vice president of marketing.

“As a certified Security Innovation Alliance (SIA) partner that natively integrates with the Mvision ecosystem, we look forward to delivering together with McAfee an advanced, evasion-proof defense for enterprises,” she said.

McCray said the overall message to partners at the conference is that “we’ve evolved our strategy.”

McAfee’s Ken McCray

“Partners have been asking us, what is our corporate strategy, where are we going, and I think the announcement of Mvision demonstrates that our new corporate strategy is around the cloud,” he said. “And for our partners it’s the opportunity for us to work with them with the Mvision product strategy, the Mvision platform, in order to migrate their customers there.”

Mvision SaaS puts McAfee back into the SaaS marketplace, McCray said.

“We haven’t been with them on this particular strategy,” he said. “This is an evolution of what we’ve been trying to get to.”

During a partner summit just prior to the conference, McAfee channel executives fielded questions from partners about strategy and opportunities.

“One of the bigger issues that was brought up was around …