Gert Jan Schenk
President of EMEA Gert-Jan Schenk is President of EMEA at McAfee with 20 years of experience in global sales and ...
I have been on the road constantly in the last few weeks speaking to large customers and partners in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden. I met with customers from large financial institutions, banks and telecommunications companies and there are a few trends I am seeing wherever I go.
The first trend is that the intensity of attacks at the moment is greater than it’s ever been and large customers are worried. They are seeing very targeted attacks and it is getting more difficult to manage the rates of growth of these attacks. People are looking to McAfee to help them stave off these attacks with new and innovative ways of dealing with the problems.
The second big trend we are seeing is that older malware is making resurgence. We have seen this through customers, partners, prospects and even from our internal support teams. Malware that once seemed to be confided to zoo collections now seem to be “in the wild” again. It is critical that businesses start looking at a combination of white-listing and black-listing technologies to ensure they are protected. There is huge interest in McAfee Application Control because of its ability to stop targeted threats such as Night Dragon and Stuxnet.
The third big trend is that consumerization of IT is happening more quickly than ever expected. One financial services company started to provide traders with Apple iPads to make sure they could access the latest financial news and data before they start trading for the day. Once the devices were given to the traders they started using them for taking notes about meetings and accessing controlled data. They were also forwarding business email to personal accounts so that they could access the information on their iPads. Unfortunately this has led to the potential for a lot of controlled data to go missing and compliance rules being broken. Businesses need to start thinking about the risk associated with these and other mobile devices and create mobile security policies that take these situations into account. Only McAfee can provide a complete mobile and endpoint solutions for heterogeneous environments.
Lastly I also wanted to announce that McAfee has appointed David Small as Vice President of Channel and Commercial Business in EMEA. He is a 20 year technology veteran handpicked to lead Channel and Mid-market operations throughout Europe, Middle East and Africa Region. He started in January and has spent his first few months undertaking a number of field listening sessions with our top partners to help understand how McAfee can improve our channel business. I believe it all starts with listening. David has already introduced some new programs and will continue to do so and there are a lot of improvements on the way. Our goal is to make McAfee the security partner of choice.
Regards,
Gert-Jan Schenk
Tags: consumerization, David Small, EMEA, malware, McAfee Application Control, Mobile, mobile security, targeted attacks
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