Ex-Cisco Exec Chris Young Heads to Intel Security
Ex-Cisco Systems (CSCO) executive Chris Young has made the leap to Intel Security, where he has taken on the role of senior vice president and general manager. Young took to the stage at last week’s McAfee FOCUS 2014 conference in Las Vegas to discuss his plans to change the state of enterprise security.
Ex-Cisco Systems (CSCO) executive Chris Young has made the leap to Intel Security, where he has taken on the role of senior vice president and general manager. Young took to the stage at last week’s McAfee FOCUS 2014 conference in Las Vegas to discuss his plans to change the state of enterprise security.
Young said he is looking to tackle three big challenges in the security industry—namely, the changing of the IT landscape, the changing attack landscape and the increasing fragmentation of the industry as a whole. He addressed some of the complexities that continue to plague the security provider market despite continually improving solutions to potential breaches. In what he calls the “industrialization of hacking,” the rapid growth in malware and other malicious software continues to outstrip the pace of security providers such as McAfee as hackers become more skilled in their craft. This, in turn, is changing the established trust abilities we take for granted, including our methods of protecting personal information and establishing secure connections.
“I do believe we’ve reached a point where complexity and fragmentation has become our enemy,” Young said. “Our attackers are innovating even faster than anyone in our industry.”
As one of the main ways to fix our current security problem, Young emphasized the importance of shrinking the attack surface, so security software can more easily pinpoint and eliminate potential threats. This, in turn, will require a simpler security model with which companies such as McAfee can focus their attention on. He also stressed Intel and McAfee’s goal of driving more unified solutions across the IT infrastructure and developing more connected architectures to make security a vital aspect of the entire ecosystem.
“I fundamentally believe that we can empower the connected world,” said Young. “This is our higher cause.”
Young is the second Cisco exec to move to Intel Security, just weeks after the former Cisco Global Vice President of Security Sales Scott Lovett also transferred to his new position as executive vice president of Worldwide Sales.
While all of these are fairly lofty goals, Young said the best way to deal with the increasing danger of cyberattacks in both the public and private sectors is to develop more of a dialogue between customers and their security companies. He also pointed out that recent high-profile breaches came not from a lack of security, but a general lack of coordination between security companies and their end users. By looking to the mistakes of past security failures, Young said, companies can learn from their mistakes and begin building a more secure strategy for dealing with the inevitability of a cyberattack—with McAfee and Intel Security leading the charge, of course.
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