McAfee customers admit the firm 'doesn't hold the best grades in everything'

Customers reflect on McAfee multivendor pledge

After McAfee CTO Michael Fey yesterday pledged a multivendor future for the company as part of its dedication to stepping up real-time, global threat reporting in its software, Computing caught up with some partners and customers for their reactions at McAfee FOCUS 2012.

Corey Cush, assistant vice-president of infrastructure services at New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) remarked that while "McAfee is a great company... they don't hold the best grades in everything".

Specifically, continued Cush, "firewalls are one of the things I don't think they're as strong in. So I look at what I'm trying to protect, and I use this analogy of buying a car. Don't buy a Lamborghini if you've got no autobahn, as you won't use all the speed it can offer. So when I'm purchasing I think price, support, company reputation and business partnership should all play a part in the decision."

Gene Fredriksen, global information security officer of security, fire protection and flow control firm Tyco, concurred: "It's about [asking] ‘What do I need the device to do?' Just because something is in the upper right hand quadrant, it doesn't mean I can use all the functionality of that."

However, Fredriksen displayed slight reservations about McAfee's ambitions, remembering how other companies had tried – and failed – to create such collaborative industry standards in the past.

"I think the operation is going to be there," said Fredriksen, "[but] it's going to take quite a partnership to solve it. We've seen many people offer their platform and say ‘Here's how to communicate with us' and a lot of people didn't bite. So we'll see how it goes."

Andrzej Kawalec, CTO of enterprise strategy services at McAfee partner HP, described McAfee's pledge as "brilliant".

"Our big enterprise clients – particularly in an outsource space – will have a smattering of all those different technologies and products anyway. So the ability to manage them is one of their biggest issues. That's one of the biggest things I get from CIOs when we chat – they need better threat intelligence, and need to understand both what's happening in their organisations, and in the rest of the world."

[Turn to next page]

McAfee customers admit the firm 'doesn't hold the best grades in everything'

Customers reflect on McAfee multivendor pledge

HP's approach, said Kawalec, is already a relatively "open" one, and HP feels that McAfee's decision to "do something quite similar" is a significant step forward in opening up solutions generally.

"There's an open versus closed theme playing out in companies across the world," said Kawalec, "and we've made a very clear decision to go open, in our cloud services and our service delivery."

From a security perspective, Kawalec called McAfee's willingness to collaborate "vital, on both sides of the fence".

"The war – if it is a war – will be won based on collaboration," said Kawalec. "So the more that the hacktivists, cybercriminals and rogue nation states work together, the harder it's going to be for the other guys. And the more that governments and enterprises and industries work together, the better it's going to be."

Unless McAfee and is partners collaborate now, with open architectures and understanding, argued Kawalec, "then you can be pretty sure the other guys are going to do that".

"So you think about that around a specific vulnerability, and it makes a lot of sense. Think about it around a bigger market for information, and the value on both sides [for vendors and customers], and I honestly believe erring on the side of open rather than closed is the only way we're going to address it together.

"It can raise competitive issues, but first and foremost we're security folk, and second we work for organisations," concluded Kawalec.