McAfee is the latest security vendor to choose Ireland to serve customers and partners
McAfee has chosen Ireland for the location of one of two global security operations centres (SOCs), as it steps up efforts to protect both itself and its customers against emerging attacks.
The two McAfee Security Fusion Centers, located in Plano, Texas and Cork, Ireland are designed to support full visibility and management of risks on a global scale.
Cork is already a hotspot for security software development and support for a number of security vendors. Malwarebytes opened a European headquarters there in early 2016, while Cylance followed suit later that year. Sophos also has a Cork office as a result of the acquisition of a startup there in 2016.
Earlier this year, AI-based security threat hunting platform vendor Vectra opened shop up the road in Dublin.
The purpose of the Fusion Centers, said McAfee, is threefold: to protect McAfee, to identify new cybersecurity product needs, and to act as a best practices blueprint for customers and partners. The facilities are also available on a monthly schedule for customers who want to visit and understand how to better manage their own security operations and to see “human-machine teaming” in practice, said the firm.
The McAfee Security Fusion Centers are run by Grant Bourzikas, chief information security officer and vice president of Labs Operations at McAfee. “The McAfee Security Fusion Center was created as a blueprint that leverages security operations technologies in new and innovative ways, enabling greater collaboration between research teams, integration with endpoint detection and response, and allowing for the future scalability of cloud-based technology,” said Bourzikas.
He said: “We call ourselves Customer Zero because we are the first organisation to use McAfee’s new offerings and product updates, and because we share our learning to help customers and partners implement faster and more smoothly.”
By using human-machine teaming and deploying automated and advanced analytics technologies to quickly elevate key insights and context, said McAfee, members of the McAfee Security Fusion Center team tasked with examining cyberthreats can focus their attention on “high-value next steps”, such as understanding a threat’s impact across an organisation and what’s needed to respond.
