New & Notable

Moving the dial on securing information in an unsecure world

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Wednesday, 02 October 2019 04:00

Las Vegas, NV - Oct 2, 2019 - In an increasingly unsecure world, it’s comforting to see major security players such as McAfee put their money where their mouth is. At MPOWER, it’s annual cybersecurity summit today, McAfee’s CEO Chris Young shared the company’s vision of providing organizations with a device-to-cloud platform, an open architecture and actionable insights to solve their cyber security challenges.

The 2018 acquisition of Skyhigh Networks, a cloud security startup company, enabled McAfee to execute on its vision of being a device-to-cloud cyber security provider. The result is the introduction of McAfee’s Unified Cloud Edge (UCE), an industry-first initiative to address the security concerns of the cloud. The intent is to simplify secure cloud adoption while seamlessly managing data protection and threat prevention Initiatives.

Many organizations have migrated their data and applications to the cloud, but secure cloud adoption remains a key challenge for CIOs and CISOs. On one hand, IT continues to struggle with limited security resources and new skills. On the other, the volume of critical enterprise data and applications continues to grow exponentially in the cloud. Both of these factors require organizations to deploy the right data protection tools while reducing complexity and improving productivity.

The Unified Cloud Edge initiative converges “the capabilities of MVISION Cloud, Web Gateway, and Data Loss Prevention offerings, all to be available through the MVISION ePolicyOrchestrator (ePO) platform, to enable a borderless IT environment”, according to Young. This convergence enables security professionals to create, unify, and automate policies to gain greater control and reduce complexity. At the same time, end users will have a more simplified experience as organizations move to secure their cloud adoption.

“Enterprises are seeking to reduce complex security infrastructure by replacing traditional, on-premises security appliances with cloud-delivered security solutions,” said Robert Westervelt, research director at IDC Data Security Practice. “The convergence of security solutions that traditionally have functioned independently will improve an organization’s security posture by creating security defenses that work cohesively to defend against attacks. But even more importantly, this convergence will help ease the burden of managing security and compliance across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, which is one of the most significant challenges enterprises face today.”

In addition to UCE, McAfee introduced MVISION Insights, a predictive analytics solution to enable organizations to quickly identify, prioritize, and respond pre-emptively to threats.

With MVISION Insights, McAfee believes that security professionals will be able to shift their approach from reactive to proactive. They will be able to use the data gathered by McAfee from more than one billion sensors worldwide, correlated with their own threat data, to provide insights needed to combat targeted attacks. At the same time, pre-emptively preparing defenses against threats before they surface in their environments.

Findings from a recent report by McAfee revealed that 71% of security professionals feel that their primary focus is to respond to a data breach occurring within their organizations. Out of the data breaches they experienced, 40% involved the theft of intellectual property, demonstrating the need for enhanced visibility and prioritization.

“Organizations want more visibility into cyber-risks so they can tailor and prioritize their response and risk remediation actions in alignment with the threats that may hit them,” said Jon Oltsik, ESG Fellow. “Many firms want to be more proactive, but do not have the resources and talent to execute. McAfee can help bridge this gap by offering organizations a global outlook across the entire threat landscape with local context to respond appropriately. In this way, McAfee can support a CISO-level strategy that combines risk and threat operations”.

Dave Bull, McAfee’s Director of Product Marketing explained that MVISION Insights will provide analytics to enable organizations to recognize the threats they must take action against, and threats that could potentially impact them in the future. “This proactive approach will significantly enhance cybersecurity effectiveness with faster response times and higher efficiencies”, said Bull.

According to McAfee, both MVISION Insights and UCE will be available to customers by the first half of 2020.

Along with MVISION Insights and Unified Cloud Edge, McAfee introduced a host of new features and functionality to its existing MVISION product portfolio, including MVISION Cloud, MVISION Endpoint, MVISION EDR, MVISION ePOand McAfee ePO. The new features are expected to be rolled out in the remainder of 2019.

McAfee MVISION portfolio is currently used by customers world-wide. With the availability of the new features and capabilities, McAfee believes that organizations can build a strong threat and data-centric defense spanning from device to cloud. “These solutions are designed to give freedom and confidence to organizations that are accelerating their business through digital transformation initiatives”, commented Rajiv Gupta, former founder and CEO of Skyhigh and senior vice president and general manager of the cloud security at McAfee. “We see a future where enterprise security is simpler, smarter and simultaneously broader than anything that’s ever come before, and with McAfee MVISION we are delivering on that vision.”

It remains to be seen if security vendors can indeed execute on that vision but it’s reassuring to witness that McAfee is dialing up on their efforts to make the world a safer place.

Good news indeed. What happens in Vegas shall not only stay in Vegas.

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