Cyber-security vendor McAfee was officially spun-out of Intel Security in April 2017 and has been steadily evolving its technologies ever since.
In a video interview with eWEEK, McAfee Senior Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer Steve Grobman provides insight into what has changed at the company and where the challenges remain in the cyber-security industry.
“When McAfee was part of Intel it was a security division in a broader technology company, focused primarily on semi-conductors,” Grobman said. “Now there is 100 percent focus on cyber-security technology and solutions, so it has been a really good move for the company.”
McAfee has long had both consumer as well as enterprise cyber-security technologies. Now as standalone company again, Grobman expects that to continue. He noted that having both the consumer and enterprise products helps each target audience.
“The consumer side helps enterprise in that we see such a wide variety of threats in the consumer space that we can learn about and then apply defensive capabilities in the corporate environment,” Grobman said.
Similarly he noted that McAfee is able to develop some very advanced technologies for the corporate space and take simplified configurations and package them up for the consumer offering.
One core area of enterprise cyber-security in recent years has become the development of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) technology, which isn’t typically necessary in the consumer device security market. Grobman said that enterprises need to look beyond simple malware detection to understand what the attack scenarios are and correlate multiple different pieces of information. On the consumer side, he noted that endpoint security is no longer just about PCs, but now involve mobile and devices connected to the Internet of Thing as well.
“We learn a lot by being in both businesses, but they are quite different,” Grobman said.
While technology can help to improve cyber-security, Grobman emphasized that there is no such thing as a ‘silver-bullet’ product that can solve all problems. Rather there is a need for collaboration between different technologies and vendors that can also be augmented by machine learning to help improve security outcomes, he said.
“It’s going to take products working together and it’s going to take products working together with (human) talent in a well-defined strategic methodology in order to have a good defense.
Watch the full video interview with McAfee CTO Steve Grobman above.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.