The 5 Boldest Statements From McAfee CEO Chris Young At MPower 2019

McAfee CEO Chris Young dishes on the company's new partnership with Oracle around security operations, the assault against cloud-based architectures, and where cyberattacks are most likely to happen.

Time Is Of The Essence

Adversaries have stepped up their pace in 2019, moving from generally indiscriminate ransomware attacks to highly targeted campaigns that have brought several dozen municipalities down this year alone, according to McAfee CEO Chris Young.

Time is the single greatest weapon that adversaries have, Young said, and has taken over the language of the industry. As regulations, alerts, products, and vendors multiple at an exponential rate, Young told attendees at McAfee MPower 2019 Wednesday that time now underpins the Santa Clara, Calif.-based platform security vendor's strategy in protecting the digital experience from the device to the cloud.

McAfee plans to leverage actionable insights, open architectures, and its device-to-cloud strategy to deliver a new generation of products and services, Young said.

Here's a look at what Young said to attendees and members of the media about why McAfee is partnering with Oracle around security operations, why diversity and heterogeneity continue to rule the industry, and why cloud-based architectures are under assault.

5. ‘It's really the beginning of a journey that we're going on together with Oracle.’

Young announced in conjunction with Oracle during Wednesday morning's keynote that McAfee will begin providing Security Operations as a Service around Oracle's platform. The partnership will make it possible for the many thousands of companies that rely on Oracle's ERP and a variety of other applications to achieve better security, Young said.

As Oracle increasingly saw its customer base consuming the company's applications via a Software as a Service model, Young said the company began searching for a security operations tool they could wrap around that. The partnership will allow Oracle to provide customers with visibility and security capabilities in relation to the SaaS applications they're delivering, according to Young.

4. ‘Diversity and heterogeneity rule this industry. We all know that.’

McAfee has worked hard to simplify operations and accelerate the customer's time to outcome through both open architectures as well as a rich ecosystem of partners, Young said. The company has achieved this by integrating devices directly with McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) console, according to Young.

Meanwhile, Young said McAfee has infused its data exchange layer with diverse sources of threat intelligence. The company has achieved this through simple API-based integrations with thousands of SaaS applications in the cloud, according to Young.

There are thousands of cybersecurity tools and vendors in the market today, and Young said McAfee has embraced that diversity to drive better outcomes on behalf of its customers.

3. ‘We're increasingly giving you visibility and control across your entire cybersecurity domain, not just individual tools.’

McAfee is committed to providing customers with actionable insights designed to optimize their risk posture against the threats that matter most, Young said. Specifically, Young said the effort is focused on helping businesses measure their performance against that of their peers.

By connecting the macro-threatscape to a company's local environment, Young said McAfee can help businesses concentrate on what matters most to their own organization. McAfee captures these insights by leveraging the telemetry from more than 1 billion sensors deployed worldwide across device, network, gateway, and cloud domains, according to Young.

Young said his longtime dream has been to connect what McAfee sees from its more than 500 million consumer devices today with the telemetry and data from enterprise customers and government agencies. Better insights can drive better outcomes across all phases of the threat defense lifecycle, according to Young.

2. ‘We all know the device and the cloud are increasingly where attacks happen, where threats manifest themselves in today's modern architecture.’

McAfee's device-to-cloud platform provides organizations with a modern architecture to address both where attacks happen as well as where sensitive data resides, Young said. The platform is purpose-built for heterogeneous on-premise ecosystems as well as multi-cloud environments, according to Young.

McAfee's security products are designed to help customers on their journey to the cloud, Young said. The platform defends against threats and protects data regardless of if it's at rest, in motion, or in use, according to Young.

The company is laser-focused on protecting data and defending against threats in a unified manner as well as putting the control points of a businesses' cybersecurity architecture in the places that matter most, Young said. McAfee will further strengthen its position around data protection and threat defense through improvements to both the company's product portfolio as well as its architecture, Young said.

1. ‘The cloud is under attack. Cloud-based architectures are under assault.’

Customers in the past worried primarily about protecting their legacy or captive infrastructure such as data centers and devices, Young said. But as high-profile incidents like the Capital One breach put cloud security on the map, Young said businesses need to get better about protecting their data, systems, and applications in the cloud as well.

Cloud is a different security paradigm than what IT organizations have traditionally worked with, Young said. Specifically, Young said that sensitive data can be shared, leaked, or stolen from the cloud without it ever encountering a network choke point or getting inspected by a traditional device.

Helping customers move to the cloud is a huge opportunity for channel partners, who Young said should be front and center with the customers enabling them and making sure they have the right configuration templates in place. The biggest single opportunity partners have to grow their business is to serve the needs of customers in emerging areas like cloud, Young said.