By Espie Angelica A. de Leon
Intel Security is pushing for a unified defense architecture for mobile devices and networks now taking the brunt of enormous cybersecurity challenges brought about by a rapidly evolving digital world.
At a press briefing organized by local IT distributor Wordtext Systems Inc. last March 22 at the Discovery Primea in Makati City, Intel Security said its McAfee product line features an integrated architecture to deliver security to endpoints, cloud, and hybrid data centers.
Under this unified approach, the security solutions are integrated, combining features using an open or common platform.
?This is where McAfee focuses on,? said McAfee Team lead for pre-sales Sanket Bhasin during the launch. ?We came out with a common platform and all of our solutions, whether it is focusing on cloud security or endpoint security, we make sure that it is part of the platform.?
At the same time, McAfee encourages providers of non-McAfee solutions to integrate with their own technologies in this open platform to share information and be more proactive and powerful in countering threats.
The solutions are automated as well, allowing for more accurate threat detection, faster remediation, closed-loop protection, and less manual intervention.
?You can have automation only with an integrated architecture,? said Bhasin, adding that cyber threats continue to increase and they are becoming more and more complex.
Meanwhile, he said mobility and cloud lessen the ability to control these threats and protect data, identity, and privacy in both the home and workplace environments.
?The digital world is an open world,? Bhasin revealed. ?We started with computers 25 years back. Then we moved to cloud. Twenty-five percent of corporate data traffic will bypass perimeter security and flow directly from mobile devices to the cloud.?
According to him, there aren?t enough resources and IT professionals to deal with this problem, thus comprehension and response will not be able to keep up.
?Now it?s the era of IoT or the Internet of Things,? Bhasin continued. ?This gives a real landscape for a hacker to enhance his landscape to do an attack.?
The integrated solutions detect more threats faster with fewer resources including human resources. IT teams in organizations are very lean, he noted.
Sixty-two percent of organizations are presently understaffed, with majority of positions taking three to six months to fill, he said. Ten percent of this will never be filled, resulting in a 2 million shortfall of qualified IT specialists by 2020.
These solutions also collaborate to deal with even bigger security problems such as closed-loop threat defense, mobile workforce security, and security for infrastructure as a service.
?We are encouraging more and more best-of-the-breed security solutions providers to come and integrate with McAfee.? Bhasin stated. ?We cannot come up with all the security solutions. Alone, we cannot fight the battle.?
