Cybersecurity Roundup: McAfee, Mimecast, SolarWinds, Palo Alto Networks
Working with third-party vendors, including competitors, helps ensure organizations have the best cloud security in place.
That’s according to D.J. Long, McAfee‘s vice president of strategic business development. He leads McAfee’s Security Innovation Alliance (SIA) partner program, which includes security software vendors with products that can enhance, augment, strengthen and broaden the core functionality of McAfee’s portfolio.
At last week’s McAfee MPower 2019 Cybersecurity Summit, we spoke with Long about the growth in partnerships and integrations, and how that’s helping customers stay one step ahead of cybercriminals.
CF: One of the main messages at MPower has been the need for working together and less of that competitive aspect. Can you elaborate on that?
DL: Our perspective is that no one security company can meet all the needs of any sophisticated corporate end-user account, so we’re well-served by aligning ourselves with companies that can augment or strengthen, or extend our core functionality by virtue of collaboration. And a unifying technology is oftentimes data exchange layer (DXL), so that’s facilitating the ability of our products to work collaboratively together in a very efficient way that increases the efficacy of our mutual products together. So it really does benefit our customers quite effectively.
CF: Can you talk about the evolving threat landscape and how all of this is helping the effort to stay one step ahead of cybercriminals?
DL: As the attack surface broadens and the sophistication of attacks increases, our customers are caught in that bind of having to deal with both of those factors along with declining budgets or fewer cybersecurity professionals that they can actually deploy to actually fend these attacks off. So our ability to provide anticipatory technologies like with MVision Insights, combined with our collaboration efforts with our business partners that enable us to really address that attack surface expansion, I think is enabling them to have safer security environments, and I think that’s a trend that many of our competitors are attempting to emulate. I think we’re a step ahead, and we’re a step ahead because we have the best open ecosystem in the cybersecurity industry. We’ve got a very well-balanced set of companies that work with us in all segments of the security industry so that we can meet the needs of a very broad range of customers on a very significant basis.
CF: Open ecosystem has been a big aspect of the conference. Is that rare in the industry?
DL: I think a lot of companies try to do it and not many of them do it successfully. Oftentimes what happens is companies become much more self-centered in terms of advocating their agenda as opposed to meeting the agendas of the customers. We’re adopting a truly open approach. In our case, we’ve put a lot of action behind our words here. We’re perfectly happy to work with our competitors if it’s in the interest of our end-user customers. For example, we work very closely with IBM Security. They have a security information and event management (SIEM) product called QRadar that competes with our Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) product, and we have a lot of common customers who have asked us to be …
This is what companies say when they don’t have a prevention first philosophy or the platform to enable prevention across the entire attack lifecycle.