Mike Fey has had a busy few years. As of Aug. 1, Fey is the president and chief operating officer of Symantec, after having had the same role at Blue Coat, which was acquired by Symantec in a $4.65 billion deal. Prior to Blue Coat, Fey was the executive vice president and CTO for McAfee at Intel Security until November 2014.
At the new Symantec, Fey is helping to align the Blue Coat teams and technology with those of Symantec in a bid to help customers stay secure and outpace industry competition. In a video interview with eWEEK, Fey details what the combined company is now able to do, the challenges of cloud security and where security is headed.
The combined Symantec and Blue Coat resources bring cloud, endpoint and network security assets together. “We move from having what we thought was the most comprehensive cloud platform to now almost being double the offering in the same space,” he said.
When looking at cloud security, Fey said that what’s needed is a shift in thinking about how to protect the cloud generation overall. Rather than a device- or network-centric approach, the Symantec view is to have a user-focused model as part of an overall platform.
“People try to shrink the cloud conversation to the area they are good at—that’s not the answer,” Fey said. “The answer is to focus on the user and following the user, not the device and not where it runs.”
Fey emphasized that focusing on the user is a shift from the traditional approach of looking at either devices or the network as the basis of security. He noted that if a single device is breached, it’s important to understand that the user’s credentials and access in other systems are also breached.
“When we think about protection, we can’t just protect the device anymore. We have to protect the user,” Fey said. “If a device gets breached we have to ask, What else about the user has also been breached?”
Watch the full video interview with Mike Fey below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.