EXPERT SPEAK
So, there are more vendors, more
products etc. If you go to RSA, there are
1,400/1,500 vendors – it’s mind bogglingly
complicated so I think that’s a challenge.
And also, that then exacerbates the talent
challenge because you’ve got more stuff to
protect, you need more skills to do so and
there’s only so many multi-functional skills
someone can have.
we can have joint growth plans with. And
then the third area is our distributors, who
represent us at volume as well.
So those are the three tiers. There’ll
also be a real focus on market expansion
and new business. We sell an architecture
and customers who get the most value
from what we do don’t buy one or two
things, they buy four or five or six different
categories from us and they get that
integrated systems value.
So really working with our partners to
incentivise them, enable them and drive
them to do that with our customers. Then there’s the threat landscape. It’s
not just sophisticated threats and the ever-
increasing sophistication of the Dark Web
and the bad actor communities and the
public-private partnerships in the Dark, Dark
Web, but also the volume of attacks – there’s
just so many of them.
And some of them are pretty basic,
just keeping up with basic block and tackle
patching is pretty hard.
And again, I think with that threat
landscape and that complexity, there’s also
the talent piece – that if you’ve got complex
systems to defend, you can’t detect at the
pace you need to and act upon that. And
therefore, you need humans, but humans
can’t operate at the pace that digital crime
can. So, there’s a real morass of challenges
for customers to face.
I think the most notable trend across the
region – including the Middle East as well
– is the march towards cloud. I think that’s
massive. It’s almost not newsworthy it’s so
well known but I think there are some really
interesting things within that.
When you look at the role of a CIO or
even a CISO, the role is changing because
of cloud and hybrid infrastructure. CIOs in
particular are becoming architects of piecing
together these cloud components and so
they become the architect of these services
and we need to help them with that.
What do you see as the key talking
points as we move into 2019?
The common themes that I’ve seen for more
than the last six years are complexity, talent
and the threat landscape. And those are
kind of enduring trends. That doesn’t mean
they’re the same thing that they were, it
means that they’re worse than they were.
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS
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What key trends have you seen in
the region in 2018?
start line. If you don’t sell, then it’s just cost,
so really going to market with them is the
first tier.
Second tier is our regional partnerships.
Different countries have different
important partners, so we need to make
sure we’re not dealing with millions of
them but really focusing in on the few in a
country that really want to co-invest and
d en
t, EM
EA McAfee
If we don’t build trust
with the right set of
partners, they’re never
going to be able to
transact at the volumes
required in order to
repilicably use their
billable skills.
Take talent. There are fewer people now
– there is a greater deficit of talent today.
Three years ago, we said there was a deficit
of one million practitioners, now we see that
at three million.
On complexity it’s getting harder, there
are more and more complex systems – we
have operations technology, IoT, sensors
are coming in. The infrastructure that
organisations are looking to protect is
getting more complicated but at the same
time the systems they use to protect that
has also got more complicated.
Is ensuring a diverse
workforce set to remain a key
part of your strategy?
It will because I care about it – it matters to
me. We talk about our company values and
our ‘why – why are we doing this?’ and of
course we are doing it to earn a living and
support our families and so on but there
are many places we can earn a living. We’re
doing it here because we believe in the
purpose of the company.
And part of that value system is also
around having a team that reflects the
nature of society we’re seeking to serve.
And I applaud what the UK
government is doing as well – it’s not
about quotas but being visible, how do you
compare to other organisations? I think
that’s a really good thing.
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