McAfee MPower: Partners 'Excited' About Company's Evolution

McAfee’s Peter Leav

McAfee MPower 2020 kicked off with CEO Peter Leav saying the company’s in a strong position to lead and innovate during these uncertain times.

Leav replaced Chris Young as CEO in January. McAfee also became a public company last week, raising more than $700 million in its IPO.

During the digital conference, McAfee unveiled new offerings, including:

Organic and Inorganic Innovation

“McAfee is in a very strong position with a very strong financial foundation, a strong record of innovation and a superb team to help innovate and lead during these uncertain times,” Leav said. “Our strength powers deep investment in both organic and inorganic innovation to help you protect what matters most to your organization. Which is why McAfee is building new capabilities to win on this front.”

In the past year, McAfee has acquired Uplevel Security, NanoSec and Light Point Security. They underscore the expansion of McAfee’s portfolio, Leav said.

“Specifically, those acquisitions deliver foundational technologies for our secure access security edge (SASE), for unified cloud edge solutions, which combine our cloud access security broker (CASB), data loss prevention (DLP) and next-gen secure web gateway solutions in a single offering,” he said.

McAfee’s Lynne Doherty

Lynne Doherty is McAfee’s executive vice president of global sales and marketing.

“While this year has been filled with lots of uncertainty, there are some things that have remained a constant for us,” she said. “First, it’s the need to accelerate transformation. Second, the need to stop threats and stop them quickly is critical. Third is the need to drive efficiency, to work smarter with your security solutions. And if these challenges weren’t already difficult and complex to manage, in the past few months they’ve become even more critical to our organizations.”

Brazen Cybercriminals

The cybercriminal has grown stronger and used COVID-19 as a lure globally, Leav said.

“There is no doubt that we have an energized adversary,” he said. “And we have seen an increase of more than 40% in publicly disclosed incidents in the first half of 2020. The tools adversaries are using with the pandemic as a launching pad include the usual suspects with a pandemic twist. External attacks on cloud services grew more than 600% from January to April. [Education saw] the second-highest spike given the sudden learn-from-home model put in place overnight in March as COVID-19 themed ransomware entered the threatscape.”

Adversaries are consulting an old playbook that says never waste a crisis, Leav said. Expanding cyberthreats, the changing marketplace and changing technology environments are key in helping to inform McAfee’s choices and investments.

Many McAfee partners are excited by the company’s “evolution,” he said.

“As I have had the opportunity to speak with many of you since joining McAfee, you have confirmed that you are seeing positive changes quickly both in our steadfast commitment to quality, as well as our focus on innovation,” Leav said. “As our 30-year history proves, constant evolution is in our DNA. So stay tuned for even more innovations in the future.”

New Tools

MVision XDR improves security operations center (SOC) effectiveness, the company said. It does so with MVision Insight’s proactive threat analytics.

MVision CNAPP delivers data protection, threat prevention, governance and compliance throughout the cloud-native application lifecycle. That includes container and OS-based workloads.

And MVision UCE provides a more comprehensive converged approach to security within the SASE framework. Furthermore it reduces the costs and complexity associated with enterprise security while enabling maximum business agility from the cloud.

McAfee’s Kathleen Curry

Kathleen Curry is McAfee’s senior vice president of global enterprise channels, OEMs and strategic alliances.

“These technologies, of course, give partners solutions that we feel are the best in the industry for up-leveling endpoint protection to more comprehensive detection and response across the entire IT environment, from your own devices all the way out to a public cloud,” she said. “But that is just the beginning. These solutions are all SaaS-delivered, so they meet customers’ changing needs for convenience and manageability while transitioning to the cloud. Secondly, these technologies are award-winning for not only DLP of on-premises data but data in the cloud, which is an exploding need with so many workers connecting remotely. Third, McAfee’s channel-first revolution means partners will see new rules of engagement resulting in partner-led services around these solutions.”

In addition, McAfee just announced a significant increase in deal registration discounting on these and many other McAfee products, Curry said.

Protecting Remote Workers

“It’s become increasingly apparent in this work-from-anywhere environment that a new paradigm is needed to ensure that remote employees, partners, contractors, etc., are protected from…

…new, unprecedented risk,” she said. “The proliferation of work being done outside the traditional work network and devices has made it possible for threat actors to attack systems in new ways. We’ve seen a massive increase in data sharing through the cloud, as well as external attacks on the cloud.”

McAfee is taking a “comprehensive” approach to helping customers stay protected against threats and protect their data from exfiltration in this new world, Curry said. McAfee XDR, CNAPP and UCE help ensure partners and customers stay secure and protected as enterprise architectures and the cyber threat landscape evolve.

“McAfee’s scope of protection delivered by these SaaS-based products goes far beyond that of other cloud-delivered security vendors,” she said. “While others focus on endpoint or web security, McAfee’s holistic approach covers the entire device-to-cloud landscape. Additionally, McAfee’s solutions can protect data across multiple clouds. These are some of the aspects that give McAfee partners a competitive edge.”

Partners can look at the global threat landscape and map it back to each customer’s specific environment, Curry said. By arming McAfee and its partners with tools to be proactive about stopping cyberattacks, they’re differentiated in today’s cybersecurity landscape.

“These new offerings are coming at a time where organizations clearly need comprehensive and proactive device-to-cloud cybersecurity for complete visibility and control over their entire ecosystem,” she said. “The challenges that today’s SOCs are facing have only been amplified this year. SOC analysts are struggling with too many tools and data siloes, as attacks are increasing – in number and sophistication. This makes it difficult to successfully do their jobs.”