McAfee’s unique positioning strategy puts its customers at the core of everything

Sanjay Manohar joined McAfee India as its Managing Director on January 3rd, 2019. He is responsible for building and leading the India team, driving adoption of McAfee’s cloud solutions, improving customer satisfaction and increasing market-share across the region. He also leads the strategy, execution and delivery of leading-edge cybersecurity offerings that protect McAfee customers from threats to their applications, networks, data, devices, and other critical assets. Sanjay’s key duties also cover strengthening the customer base across verticals and heading channel partner and alliance engagements. With his expertise in the areas of SaaS, enterprise software and networking, Sanjay tries to foster an innovative mindset across teams and drive agility in complex functioning environments.

The cybersecurity landscape is ever evolving, while making it important for businesses and customers to stay informed on emerging threats as well as deploy cutting edge technology to mitigate risks. McAfee has been enabling humans and machines to work together and has been setting the pace in advanced security solutions. Sanjay Manohar, MD - McAfee India in a chat with VARINDIA explains how building on its device-to-cloud positioning has helped the company to not only simplify cloud adoption for its customers but also evolve their security maturity in the digital journey -

McAfee is committed to putting its customers at the core of everything it does. With its unique positioning as a device-to-cloud security company, McAfee’s goal is to help customers make the right decisions as they evolve their security maturity in their digital journey. 

As businesses transform, customers constantly add new devices, clouds, and connections – leading to multiple points of breach. McAfee anticipates 25.1 billion connected devices by 2021 and every device is a potential target and entry point. “As a 32 year old pure play cybersecurity company, we have a scorching track record of innovation, and are best placed to take advantage of this transformation,” clarifies Sanjay.

He further continues, “Being one of the largest device-to-cloud cybersecurity players, we are responsible for protecting 622 million total endpoints - 97 million enterprise endpoints, 525 million consumer endpoints and 69,000 enterprise customers. Threats can come from anywhere. From phishing scams to cyber espionage, security threats continue to grow progressively sophisticated and complex. Today’s security challenges include ransomware, fileless malware, spam, spyware, data loss, host intrusion, security management, mobile malware, social networking exploits, and phishing scams. We go with the assumption that every device is a potential target and an entry point.” 

McAfee’s cloud-first approach ensures that securing the cloud isn’t an afterthought. Its MVISION portfolio is the first cloud-based product family that protects data and stops threats across all cloud environments, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, devices, networks and on-premises environments to accelerate business without compromising security. 

“With our Cloud native, automated and insight driven MVISION portfolio, we enable organizations to orchestrate and control enterprise IT assets across their value chain. McAfee MVISION addresses the needs for security automation and simplification across both McAfee as well as third-party tools. We have further bolstered these strengths with the recent acquisition of NanoSec, and have already integrated their market-leading capabilities into our cloud security solutions. This also demonstrates how we are working to integrate security natively into DevSecOps processes and toolsets to discover and address security issues before applications are deployed. Our commitment to enabling organizations reach their full cloud potential is also demonstrated through our extended our relationship with Oracle, to offer cloud-based next-generation security operations center,” he reiterates.

While Indian enterprises are adopting Cloud at an accelerating pace, a significant number of mission critical workloads are expected to remain On-premise for the foreseeable future. This creates a situation where CISOs are juggling security and compliance across the premise, the network and different flavours of cloud. Due to this, there are significant gaps emerging in the current framework. McAfee’s Unified Cloud Edge is the company’s vision for a Cloud-native security platform that enables organizations to apply consistent data security and threat protection controls across On-premise, Network and Cloud.

Earlier this year, building on its device-to-cloud positioning, McAfee introduced Unified Cloud Edge, an industry first initiative, to simplify secure cloud adoption while seamlessly managing data protection and threat prevention initiatives across domains.

McAfee has been judged as the leader consistently in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Access Security Brokers.

The security landscape over the years
Threats in today’s environment are not only complex and constantly evolving but have the potential to inflict substantial financial and reputational damage to an organization. Threats are now diverse, complex and adaptive. The use of cloud services has transformed businesses. However, security of data has also taken center stage as enterprises migrate to cloud-based platforms. 

To this Sanjay advices that cloud security must focus on understanding and assessing security preparedness, and evaluate risk and apply data protection policies to strategically apply protection to the entire cloud infrastructure. 

“McAfee is closely following the threat landscape, understanding the new techniques used by bad actors and then rapidly developing new security technologies and tools. As a company steeped in security expertise and experience but with a forward-looking approach, we are in the best position for success. Today, our security solutions are used by 80% of Fortune 100 firms and 75% of Fortune 500 firms.”