nsights, which McAfee CEO Chris Young has identified as a strategic direction of product development for the company.
“McAfee has an amazing quantity of threat telemetry collected from about a billion sensors across consumer and enterprise installations around the world that see a wide range of technical indicators in networks, web gateways, endpoints and cloud-based operations,” he said.
To make use of all these telemetry, Grobman said McAfee has “built a pipeline” that is able to ingest this data, redact it where required and prepare it to be analysed.
“In five minutes alone, we get 116 million pieces of telemetry that sets the foundation for being able to look at information that ultimately will be able to transform into a capability that will give organisations a different type of visibility into their environment.”
In the same way that the US national hurricane centre is able to translate storm telemetry into a projected path and impact of a hurricane, Grobman said McAfee is working to transform cyber security telemetry to provide insights on which organisations can base a plan of action.
“We want to ensure we are able to provide new ways of thinking about the world and what is happening in organisations and how they intersect. We essentially want to take the raw data out of those billion sensors, combine it with organisation-specific data and transform it using world class analytics capability into information that is actionable,” he said.
To support McAfee’s efforts to deliver insights, Grobman said the company is running a research project to develop a real-time system that provides a global view every second of every day of the threats that are occurring around the world.
“There are so many scenarios that we will be able to look at and then identify which customers will be potentially affected and give them an early warning of what is coming so they can take defensive actions before the proverbial storm hits,” he said.
“We recognise that nation states and cyber criminals continue to up their game, and so must we because we can no longer pretend that the data from a single environment will be sufficient to defend our organisations.
“Future innovation is going to be all about identifying insights from the confluence of data from organisations and a global perspective and then building the next generation of analytics that looks at that type of data to enable a bright future.”