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McAfee Adds Channel Exec for the Enterprise

McAfee this week appointed Kathleen Curry to be its senior vice president for global enterprise channels, OEM and strategic alliances at a time when the way cybersecurity technologies are consumed is dramatically shifting.

The former Apple executive joins McAfee at a time when many partners are urgently being asked to help organizations secure remote endpoints as more employees work from home to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. That requirement has driven a significant increase in demand for both endpoint security software and the cloud services through which those endpoints are managed.

Kathleen Curry

Longer term, cybersecurity itself is increasingly becoming both more automated and augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that should help plug what is today a chronic cybersecurity skills shortage.

That skills shortage has been both a boon and a bane to the channel. On the one hand, it creates massive demand for cybersecurity expertise. The challenge is that partners are often unable to hire and retain that talent in the face of stiff competition for cybersecurity professionals from both end user organizations and rival IT services providers.


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As automation and AI technologies become more widely employed, partners can rely on McAfee to help them navigate that transition, says Curry.

“It’s our job to see around the corners,” says Curry.

Naturally, much of the automation and AI technologies that will be applied to cybersecurity will be delivered via the cloud. Most cybersecurity service providers are not going to be able to make the level of investment required to build and deploy these technologies on their own. Many managed security service providers (MSSPs) in the months ahead will have to make bets on when and where it makes more sense to resell a service provided by McAfee or another vendor versus building it themselves.

None of that means the cybersecurity opportunity for channel partners is going to disappear any time soon. In anything, demand in the short term for cybersecurity expertise has increased as the number of phishing attacks involving COVID-19 claims has increased. However, the way cybersecurity services are delivered and consumed is about to change utterly.

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