1 Minute News: McAfee CEO—Cybersecurity Must Be the New Quality Standard

During his keynote speech at a Mobile World Congress yesterday, McAfee CEO Christopher Young asserted that enterprises must “make cybersecurity the new quality. Make it just like the quality movement in the 1980s . We need a J.D. Power equivalent for cybersecurity.”

He also alluded to the current security crisis in the Internet-of-Things (IoT): “Security cannot be an aftermarket or afterthought in the world of connected devices.”

Takeaway: McAfee is collaborating to bring some long overdue cybersecurity protections to IoT voice-activated assistant devices, although the effectiveness of that protection hasn’t been tested. Continue to exercise caution around IoT devices in the enterprise, and do not share confidential information around them.

More relevantly, Young is right: cybersecurity needs to be made a part of quality assurance regardless of industry. It needs to be taken seriously, and considered as part of design processes. We don’t live in world where these things can be ignored anymore. Your enterprise must consider how your products will collect data and how that data will be secured. There is market research to suggest that customers will actually change their shopping habits and reject companies that are careless with their data. So cybersecurity and quality are also linked in a fundamental way: they both affect your ultimate bottom line.