This blog was written by Chris Young, McAfee’s former CEO.
I led last week’s FOCUS 16 conversation with a simple question – “Are we safer together, or apart?”
It was a powerful way to begin my keynote, and you can safely presume the answer I gave on behalf of all of us at McAfee: cybersecurity outcomes are best when we work together.
Together is Power.TM
This is our vision for the future. Working together is essential not only for all of cybersecurity. This tenet also will be the driving force behind the new McAfee brand. I was truly proud in Las Vegas to unveil our new logo on the FOCUS stage with nearly 3,500 McAfee customers and partners in the audience—and with several thousand employees joining via webcast from around the world. These are the stakeholders that have made possible our journey over the decades. And these are the men and women who will make the new McAfee brand the largest and best pure-play in cybersecurity. Look for the new brand mark in the coming months.
A new product logo is a big change, but one thing that didn’t change on the FOCUS stage is our commitment to be our customers’ #1 cybersecurity partner. Earning that privilege is our north star.
Now here’s what did change at FOCUS 16. We announced a whole new series of integrated platforms and automated workflows that will enable all of us in cybersecurity to work together in ways never before thought feasible. Last week’s big news centered on a record number of innovations from McAfee that were a year in the making. And all of the headlines we created are underpinned by a book that we also dropped at FOCUS.
The Second Economy: The Race for Trust, Treasure and Time in the Cybersecurity War, lays out McAfee’s view of cybersecurity’s future. Authored by Steve Grobman, our Chief Technology Officer, and Allison Cerra, our Vice President of Marketing, The Second Economy puts into plain language the cybersecurity challenge, and invites readers to understand and enlist in the cause. I encourage you to read the book and challenge your own assumptions, consider abandoning obsolete defense strategies, and sign onto driving robust collaboration for a more secure world. In the ‘second economy,’ money (or, treasure) is not the only currency in play; we battle for trust and against time as well. To win the cybersecurity war for the long term, we must succeed on all three fronts.
Winning means working together. That’s why we introduced more than 18 new products and partner innovations across our portfolio at FOCUS 16. They are the result of hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D investments over the past twelve months. Many of those investments mean McAfee now has more engineers, more product managers, more UX experts, and more professional services members on the job, serving our customers.
But perhaps the most important announcement at FOCUS was our boldest-ever collaboration play. We are opening our Data Exchange Layer (DXL) communications fabric to…well, everyone. That’s right. Open DXL for the entire industry. It’s our call-to-arms to face the cybersecurity challenge in a way that no others have. I’m excited and proud to lead this charge and to put this invitation to all cybersecurity innovators: Let’s. Work. Together.
We also introduced a new architecture vision, where routine task automation goes to a new, unprecedented level of orchestration. Human oversight is still in the mix, but we’re advancing human-machine teaming to its highest level yet. Additional innovations strengthen security around the key control points of cloud and endpoint.
What’s more, we’ll provide cybersecurity-as-a-service in a way that allows our customers to redeploy their own people as escalation points – focusing on the toughest, most urgent emergencies, instead of routine attack remediation. Put simply, our roadmap for tomorrow enables cybersecurity on your terms.
I’ve never been as proud of my talented colleagues as I was last week at FOCUS, demonstrating the power and elegance of our new, integrated architecture. I know not everyone is with us on this point – at least, not yet. But I also know working together is the future of cybersecurity. Every day, more are realizing that the only way to address more of today’s threats, faster, and with fewer resources, is to integrate and collaborate. It’s the way forward. The second economy demands it, and the first economy deserves no less.
Even our new logo pays tribute to the power of collaboration with its striking two-tone red shield. It visually represents the most important message each of us in this fight needs to understand. We’re smarter together. We’re safer together. We’re better together.
Together is Power.TM
No question: It’s a new day for the new McAfee brand – and our best days are ahead.
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