That last time that Chris Young was at an Intel Security Focus conference, he arrived in a bit of a whirlwind, having just been appointed the boss.
Now a year into his tenure, he tells CBR that "We’ve been through a lot of transformation this year, part of the reasons why, it wasn’t me, our more creative minds came up with the idea for the theme for the conference which is "New. Next".
Key to that is deeper integration into the Intel mothership. "We’re moving from Mcafee to Intel security so that we’re more a core part of what Intel is doing", says Young.
"We’ve now become part of Intel and started to take up that mission of protecting the connected experience," he says.
To underline the point he says: "Now Intel Security is Intel. My boss is the CEO. There’s no separation any longer."
Unsurprisingly, Young feels that this is a benefit to the business, and gives the example of being able to launch an automotive security group, backed by the full capacity of Intel. "I got to tell you," says Young, "if it was just Mcafee doing that I don’t think we would have gotten that much of a reaction. I think it was because it was Intel."
Young says that even though he has an "almost completely knew leadership team", one of the things he’s proudest of in his first is "our ability to deliver to our customers and the business throughout," the transformation.
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Young is a dynamic executive, and he wanted to bring this to his new company, when he joined from Cisco. "I could come in and spend 6 to 9 months kind of thinking about it, you know, getting to learn the organisation, going to a lot meetings", he says. Instead "my whole thing was ‘we gotta get on this" and we got to hold ourselves to some deadlines".
During the FOCUS 15 conference, Intel Security revealed a more rounded approach to security, summed up with their notion of the threat defence lifecycle, and new products to implement it.
Young said he wanted Intel Security to "think about threat defence more holistically, and that’s
where the threat defence lifecycle came from."
When people come back to the FOCUS event next year he wants that not to just be a slogan on the stage, but something his customers are experiencing in reality.
He also wants his firm to help strip out some of the complexity in security: "We had to be honest with ourselves, hey we were kinda part of the problem, so we need to simplify what we were doing."
Just a year into the job, you get the impression speaking to Chris Young that his shake up of Intel Security is only just beginning.
