McAfee: Customers Need a Better Security Architecture, Not Another Product
CHANNEL PARTNERS EVOLUTION — Fighting today’s increasingly sophisticated cybercriminals requires a new mindset and developing a strategic architecture.
That’s according to Brett Kelsey, McAfee’s vice president and chief technology strategist for the Americas. He gave a keynote presentation titled “Customers Need a Better Security Architecture, Not Another Product,” during Day 1 of Channel Partners Evolution.
“The No. 1 thing that channel partners need to understand, first and foremost, is they need to have a greater conversation around the direction the customers are going and start looking at how they can make not just technology, but people and the various groups in the organizations work together better,” he said. “They have to functionally work together from a personnel perspective, but technologically, solutions have to start coming together to then create an ecosystem approach that can foundationally start talking across all of that. And it isn’t necessarily one technology vendor who’s going to supply all of that. It’s going to be a multitude, but it’s not going to be hundreds, and you’re going to come together like an overall componentry to actually function as a unique ecosystem.”
Effective cybersecurity isn’t built in a silo, which fosters security sprawl and leaves organizations vulnerable to attacks, Kelsey said.
“Depending on their organization, it can be a very uphill challenge, especially at the lower level from a technology perspective,” he said. “But at the executive level, most organizations have started to truly understand the value of bringing those things together, both from a business and a technology resolution perspective. And the more that we focus at that higher-level component and drive that capability into the organization, the more successful the actual company is going to be in thwarting off the bad guy from a security perspective.”
Kelsey said he’s not just spreading helpful information, but sounding an alarm that the cyber threat landsdape is about to get a whole lot worse and organizations better prepare for it.
“It’s going to continue to exacerbate the problem if we don’t start attacking the problem in this different manner,” he said. “We’ve continued to do the same thing over and over again for years; we’ve heard what that analogy actually means, and we’ve got to look at it in a different way. And if we don’t look at it at the bigger picture, the architectural component and the business aspects of it fundamentally, then the bad guys are going to continue to win.”
