Cloud and IoT Security: The Makings of McAfee MVISION Cloud

In 2011, Rajiv Gupta, Ph.D., wanted to develop a game-changing idea for the IT field. Then a vice president and general manager at Cisco, his team created the Identity Services Engine at the company Securent, which Cisco acquired in 2007. The product later won Cisco’s internal Pioneer Award. Gupta interviewed scores of executives as part of that research and brainstormed with long-term colleagues Sekhar Sarukkai, who, like Gupta, has a Ph.D. in computer science, and Kaushik Narayan, who was then a principal engineer at Cisco.  We made it very clear that we would not write a single line of code until we figured out what we were going to do because what happens is technologists, as you probably know, very often get enamored by the technology and then to try and figure out where they can apply it,” Gupta said. “They ask themselves: ‘What is the solution to which I have the answer?’ And I was determined not to do that.”  So the three sat down to come up with five distinct potentially disruptive ideas. The work was something like doing a miniature MBA — evaluating the size of the business opportunity, relevant market trends, the competitive landscape and so forth.