Throughout history, guard dogs, canons, moats, and drawbridges have kept intruders out of homes and businesses.

These preventative measures merely block off entrances, offer little, if anything, in the way of proactively preventing threats, and don’t let you make adjustments on the fly.

Today’s businesses face a similar predicament. Maybe there aren’t any moats or guard dogs, but when customers purchase and deploy point security products, it’s difficult for them to know whether they’re completely overdoing it or completely under protected and vulnerable to attack.

In this third part of our blog series Redefining Endpoint Security, we take a look at Risk Advisor. (Be sure to read our two previous posts on Deep Defender and ePolicy Orchestrator, too, if you haven’t.)

Risk Plus Visibility

No one wants to think about security after the fact. By then it’s too late.

Risk Advisor plugs right into McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) and correlates threats, vulnerabilities, and countermeasures so customers have the information needed to pinpoint assets that are at risk and require immediate action. That means IT departments have control of the tools they need to act immediately, rather than having to guess and hope.

This also means eliminating “patch panic” so customers don’t need to worry about every individual patch. Instead, they can focus on critical risks and better understand which regulations are impacted by a specific threat, and what corrective actions are required to ensure compliance.

With a consolidated viewer, Risk Advisor makes it easy to see detailed information about a specific threat, with a complete description and overview, analysis, remediation, and recommended actions.

Minimizing Risk, Maximizing ROI

Common questions you may hear your customers ask likely include:

• Where am I at risk?
• How am I at risk?
• What is the ROI for deployed security products?
• What about patches?

With Risk Advisor, you can help your customers better answer those questions and rest assured their infrastructure is more secure. No moats or guard dogs required.

Watch this video for more details and information around Risk Advisor’s features and capabilities. http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/demos/risk-advisor-demo.html

Learn more about McAfee Risk Advisor.

Before the trip, I spent a whole week in Russia and I’m really excited about the potential this market holds for the McAfee business. Our new office in Moscow looks great and is well-connected. We already have a first-class team in place and we’ve made significant headway in terms of certification.

As a country, Russia is a land of opportunity. The people are so entrepreneurial and dynamic. In terms of the security market in the region, there are a number of critical infrastructures in the energy sector that need to be protected and secured. With our top-notch products, deep knowledge and expertise in this domain, McAfee is well-placed to support customers in this market as it already does in other geographies. Speaking of great products, I was very pleased to hear that in the endpoint space, McAfee Deep Defender just scored 100% in a rootkit protection test. Congratulations to the team!

This aside, this week has been a very busy one for the McAfee team. After a short two days at my base in our Amsterdam office, I jetted off again to Santa Clara for a strategy meeting with the Corporate Executive team. Meanwhile, McAfee executives were representing the team both at the RSA Conference in San Francisco and at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. At RSA, Mike Fey, McAfee’s Worldwide CTO gave a compelling keynote on the fundamentals of security. He discussed how information needs to be easily accessed and easily consumed, but it also needs to be up-to-date and real-time. Organisations cannot base security decisions on past historical data, when the bad guys are one step ahead, attacking in the present.

Our vision of an integrated Security Connected platform seems to be supported by the wider security market; we recently announced the acquisition of ValidEdge Sandboxing technology. Beyond the pure acquisition of this technology, our objective is to set the bar for comprehensive malware protection, moving away from signature-based detection to behaviour-based detection, which will address the ever-changing fundamentals of security architecture and help our customers better anticipate real-time attacks. Security needs to be open and interactive. This is the reason why we created the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance (SIA), which has become the security industry’s premier technology partnering programme. It enables us to protect and optimise our customers’ existing investment while reinforcing their security posture at the same time. This week 11 new partners joined the McAfee SIA, which is great to see!

After RSAC and MWC, the coming week will see the start of CEBIT in Hannover. Our DACH team will be onsite on a pretty impressive designer stand with outstanding demos. Next week will also be very busy for the team in Amsterdam; we’ll be running our Executive week at our Executive Briefing Center (EBC) with our co-president Mike DeCesare, Candace Worley SVP andGeneral Manager Endpoint Security, Pat Calhoun, SVP and General Manager Network Security. I’m looking forward to welcoming our C-Level customers there for a unique experience.

Q1 Highlights – Tremendous Momentum Underway

Q1 was the best quarter in the company’s history. Thanks for making me look good in my first quarter in the new role. We achieved balanced growth across all theaters and all segments. In fact, several areas of the business came in ahead of plan, including – Network Security, Application and Change Control and Enterprise Security Manager (fueled by our NitroSecurity SIEM business.)

We’ve also received various industry accolades in Q1, that validate our momentum, including:

• SC Magazine — Best Global Security Company of the Year
• CRN  — Top 20 Coolest Cloud Security Vendors
• CRN — 5-Star Partner Program

The Database Security Market: A Greenfield Growth Opportunity

Mike Fey, our SVP of Advanced Technologies and Field Engineering, pointed out in our Tech Chat that database security will double to a $1.2B market by 2013. Combine that with the fact that more than 90% of all data breaches involve a database, and it is easy to see that together we have a massive opportunity to protect our mutual-customers. We want to help you build or strengthen your database security practice. To build a practice step 1 is to get Risk & Compliance certified by logging into our Partner Portal and going to our new Partner Learning Center. To strengthen your practice I highly recommend checking out our database security sales play, which you can access by logging into our Sales and Marketing Portal. And be on the look out for a database security ACE in July.

Key Priorities for Q2: Build Your Expertise, Amplify Your Value

Become a trusted advisor to your customers by building your expertise and amplifying your value through these resources:

• VSKO – Take advantage of these online sales resources to grow your product and sales expertise. Complete a Sales Play and learn how to sell more while demonstrating value.
• Accredited Channel Engineer Program (ACEs) – Our data shows that, together, we have won business deals about 90% of the time when ACE Proof-of-Concepts (POCs) have been completed. Over 200 POCs were completed or in progress by our partners in Q1.  Our goal is to continue to have partners deliver more POC’s without the help of a McAfee SE.
• Capture the SMB Opportunity – SMB represents a significant growth opportunity (nearly $7.5 billion by 2015).  To help motivate you to go after that SMB market, we are doubling the rewards points in our SMB program, under TSB, TSA, and STP suites.
• Win Great Prizes with the Rewards Extravaganza – Every deal you book in the Commercial and SMB segments makes you eligible for great prizes, including our grand prize drawings in Q3–$20,000 SMB Extravaganza and $25,000 for Commercial Extravaganza.

Finally, our Partner Summit will take place October 23-25 in Las Vegas. More details to follow, but please save the date, as I look forward to seeing you there in person.

Good selling!

We made several announcements at this year’s McAfee SecurityAlliance Partner Summit all focused on driving partner profitability, in case you missed it, here’s the press release.

Looking for a comprehensive 2011 Partner Summit recap of what was unveiled – we’ve got you covered.

EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it. At FOCUS11 McAfee launchedePO DeepCommand, providing a new level of security management and DeepDefender, transforming how the industry approaches security.

ePO DeepCommand is available now. Here’s a demo, which includes information on the ePO DeepCommand reporting and discovery module.

Looking for third party insight and analysis from the 2011 Partner Summit here’s a few for you to read:

• Intel execs bullish on McAfee technology, channel expertise
• Intel, McAfee talk channel, innovation
• McAfee seeking ‘ACE’ partners to drive technical pre-sales efforts
• McAfee launches new channels initiatives
• McAfee boosts deal registration margin

On Oct. 27, we hosted our Quarterly Channel Partner Town Hall, if you missed it, here’s the replay.

Our next Town Hall will likely be January 19, 2012. Pencil it in and we will get an invite out in December with the confirmed date.

Want to know how data center customers are looking to improve their security? Then mark your calendar for Nov. 30, 2011 to attend the McAfee webcast, How can organizations improve their security, where Gabriel Consulting will share their Data Center Security Survey results.

The Tweet of the month comes from PaoloCDN, Paolo Del Nibletto: “Renee James said she was either crazy to spend $8B on a security co. or made the single most important acquisition this decade.”

As always I appreciate any feedback. Please comment below.