Boosting agility in the fight against cybercrime—McAfee embraces the modern workplace with Microsoft 365

Today’s post was written by Mark Mincin, senior vice president and chief information officer at McAfee.

At McAfee, the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, we exist to protect our customers from threats to their cybersecurity, on all fronts. The explosion of different devices connected to the internet, including doorbells, refrigerators, security cameras, and endpoints inside and outside corporate firewalls, has ushered in new risks—and new opportunities for us to offer protection.

Less than a year ago, McAfee separated from Intel. We had a unique chance to revitalize our IT organization with a clean slate and a cloud-first strategy to take advantage of these new market opportunities. We chose Microsoft 365 E5 to facilitate rapid deployment and create an IT environment that fosters speed and agility—our foremost values. The fact that we can stand up robust capabilities in a short period of time means we can provision infrastructure to innovate cybersecurity products quickly and keep our customers safe.

Today, we have a modern workplace environment that helps accelerate innovation to address the changing cybersecurity landscape. Using cloud services that are integrated, mobile, and richly collaborative means we can get to innovation faster, helping McAfee stay ahead in a digital market. It’s not about how many hours we are in front of a computer, it’s about how we can impact the business. And the ecosystem we are developing allows people to be more productive at their work—brainstorming and communicating in real-time, anywhere, on any device, working seamlessly in workflows across the different cloud services. This is how we will be able to better support our customers and keep their digital assets secure.

Mobility, too, was a large part of our decision to move to Microsoft 365. A substantial number of our employees are mobile, and keeping them productive anytime, anywhere aligns with our corporate culture of agility. Today, if a McAfee employee is on the road, or at their desk, the work experience and ability to contribute is the same. In the past, much of our employees’ work required a VPN; today, single sign-on to all the Office 365 services goes a long way to increasing productivity and creating a better user experience. I’m also excited about the Microsoft services we have yet to deploy. For example, MyAnalytics is a hidden gem, poised to help us understand how we spend our time at work. I can’t wait to see how we leverage this data to unlock an even more productive, creative enterprise.

With Microsoft Teams, we are beginning to realize our vision for an agile, collaborative organization. These integrated hubs for teamwork in Office 365 are used by 50 IT leaders from around the globe to focus on some of our most critical challenges and opportunities inside IT; we call them the Five Big Rocks. We created a Teams site for each one, where employees meet, share information, and collaborate through creative teamwork. For instance, one team is devoted to increasing IT velocity, using collaborative tools to move forward with innovative ideas around a more agile business. Other teams address how to drive customer satisfaction, how to grow talent in the organization, and how to measure IT value. This last team sends a weekly IT scorecard to our CEO, demonstrating the value of IT to the business at large. The real-time nature of the platform is a vast improvement over lengthy email threads, and we are all working more efficiently as a result.

Using the array of tools available with Office 365, we can create value by reducing extraneous software in our environment. It came to my attention shortly after joining McAfee that there were as many as 2,800 Box accounts in use throughout the organization. This struck me as a perfect opportunity to cut down on a significant expense: we moved 95 percent of these workloads to SharePoint Online and OneDrive—rich collaboration tools we already had available in Office 365.

We are just at the outset of our cloud journey, but already the environment we have created with Microsoft 365 fosters productive, mobile collaboration and teamwork. It’s a direct reflection of our tagline—together is power—and I’m excited to see how it plays out for McAfee in the coming years.

Read the case study for more on the how McAfee is using the Microsoft 365 Cloud to boost agility, speed, and security.

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Source: Microsoft Office Blog