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Gartner Expert
Neil MacDonald
Distinguished VP Analyst
Neil MacDonald is a Vice President, Distinguished Analyst and Gartner Fellow Emeritus in Gartner Research, based in Florida. Mr. MacDonald is a member of the Business and Technology Insights organization. He focuses his efforts on helping security general managers find profitable growth opportunities in cybersecurity providing actionable insights derived from Gartner's research, surveys and security forecast data. Specific research areas include container/serverless security, protection of cloud workloads and applications, cloud security posture management and protection from advanced and targeted attacks with zero trust, adaptive security architectures based on a continuous adaptive risk and trust assessment (CARTA) strategic approach. Recent research explores the convergence of network and network security as a service into a cloud-based secure access service edge (SASE) and security service edge (SSE), enabling zero trust, anywhere/anytime access for a digital business and workforce.
Previous experience
Mr. MacDonald joined Gartner in 1995 as an Analyst on Gartner's local area networking research team, where he focused on network computing infrastructure, including identity and access management, directory services and networked operating system security. This later evolved into Gartner's identity and access management research area.
From 2001 through 2003, he led Gartner's worldwide team of industry-focused analysts, extending Gartner's research relevancy outside of the IT department to business executives wanting to use IT to better run their business. When this research team was folded back into the main research organization in 2004, he rejoined the information security research team.
In 2020, Neil moved to the Gartner for General Managers team, helping security general managers find profitable growth opportunities in cybersecurity..
Prior to joining Gartner, he worked for an information management organization in IT operations, where he was a network specialist responsible for the planning, deployment, security and support of a 9,500-node multiprotocol and multiserver LAN/WAN system.
Professional background
MD Buyline, Systems Analyst, 1 years
NextEra Energy (was Florida Power and Light), Networking Specialist, 8 years
Texas Power and Light, Transmission and SCADA Control Engineering, 4 years
Areas of coverage
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Security of Applications and Data
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Infrastructure Security
Education
B.S., with distinction, Electrical Engineering, University of Kansas
M.B.A., Florida International University
Top Issues That I Help Clients Address
Securing next-generation virtualized data centers and server workloads, including containers
Securing cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service deployments
Strategies for securing containers and serverless, including scanning in development.
Using the convergence of network aand network security as a service into the secure access service edge (SASE) to reduce complexity and improve secure access for digital businesses.
Security architecture and controls evolution using continuous adaptive risk and trust (CARTA)