Enrique Salem served as the CEO of Symantec from 2002 until 2012, and in that decade, he learned a lot about what’s important in the security world. Today, Salem sits on the board of directors at multiple companies, including, ForeScout and FireEye, where he helps management set strategic direction.
In a video interview with eWEEK, Salem discusses the key trends he sees driving security forward in 2014. Salem also explains how he manages his career as an advisor and member of multiple corporate boards to help guide companies forward.
A key trend that Salem sees is the move from desktop and laptop computing to mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones. The other key trend that Salem sees is the emergence of new architectures in the data center and how IT delivers services. He noted that services used to come from within the four walls of an organization’s own data center and now increasing amounts of services are coming from the cloud.
Salem explained he decided to sit on the ForeScout board of directors because he sees ForeScout as a vendor that is likely to succeed in delivering security services to meet the emerging IT trends.
“My goal is not to be a full-time board member, that’s not interesting to me,” Salem said. “What’s interesting to me is to be able to work closely with a company on all aspects of the business.”
Salem currently sits on the board of directors at ForeScout, FireEye, DocuSign and Atlassian, and he said in all those cases the companies are all poised to be market leaders.
As a member of the board of directors at FireEye, Salem was part of the discussions that led to the $1 billion acquisition of Mandiant earlier this year. Salem said FireEye is really good at detecting new threats and works with ForeScout to handle threats once detected.
“What Mandiant brought is also the ability to do the next step and some of the forensic capabilities,” Salem said.
Watch the full video interview with Enrique Salem below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.