Intel Security will sharpen its focus on data analytics as it seeks to solve fragmentation in the cybersecurity industry it believes is leaving many businesses vulnerable to attack.
Speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, the vendor announced several upgrades to its product lines, including the Next Generation Firewall, Enterprise Security Manager and Data Exchange Layer.
It follows complaints from IT departments that they cannot respond to a deluge of security alerts, with just under half saying doing so took up valuable time in a survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group, a research firm.
Chris Young, SVP and GM of Intel Security, said:"Attackers will always have the advantage as long as they have unlimited opportunities to determine which tactics are effective, while defenders struggle to understand the nature of what is confronting them.
"To shift the advantage from attackers to defenders, we need to dramatically re-think how we see, understand, and respond to security events, allowing defences to adapt at least as fast as attackers adapt their tactics."
The move follows comments made at Intel Security’s annual conference last October where Young, the company’s chief, worried that the industry was "creating its own problems" because of its tendency to fragment.
Speaking about the importance of analytics, Young pointed to the success that other industries have had in using statistics to improve performance.
As an example he singled out baseball, a field disrupted by analytics in a trend chronicled by the journalist Michael Lewis, whose book Moneyball has been lionised by data enthusiasts.
"In our industry we’ve long embraced the concept of data analytics," Young said. "I believe we can write our own Moneyball story for the security industry."
Alongside the updates to its firewall and threat intelligence offerings, Intel Security also launched the McAfee Public Cloud Server Security Suite, which will be available to download from the Amazon Web Services marketplace.
The offerings are among the first since Intel has shed the McAfee name, which featured prominently at Intel Security’s last conference despite long mooted plans for a rebrand – though it has kept the shield logo.
Speaking at RSA, Young indicated he was feeling the pressure in his new role, which he took up after moving from Cisco’s security division.
"As an industry we’re on our way to having over $100bn (£67bn) spent on cybersecurity solutions," he said. "We’ve got more dollars, more smart people and more important people paying attention to us."
