There are several excellent cybersecurity companies out there, but do cloud-based providers make better investments than more traditional device-based security providers like FireEye (MNDT)? In this Fool Live video clip, recorded on May 28, Fool analyst Tim Beyers and chief growth officer Anand Chokkavelu discuss FireEye's business model and why they ranked it seventh out of seven major cybersecurity stocks.
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Anand Chokkavelu: Let's go with No. 7. Tim, it's FireEye. Tell us all about it.
Tim Beyers: I think of FireEye classically as a firewall company. This is one I don't know as well. It has some intelligence. There's different security companies, and this is one of them, that historically have been device companies, and that's been a weak area in security. Because I don't have super in-depth knowledge of FireEye, I want to talk about where this fits. When you're a device and you're fitting into a network, and you're trying to defend, say, a network, you want to be able to cover the vast majority of the threat landscape. If you're just a device, you really are only protecting that part of the threat landscape that applies to where the device lives. I think that's one of the real weaknesses with FireEye and all the device-based companies, and I think we have three of them in this list. When I think of FireEye, this was really promising, about six to eight years ago as a company, and it's still not a bad company. The problem is you want to have more than just good devices for security. When I think about FireEye, I think it is good for what it does, but it's very limited by the fact that it's primarily device company trying to get out and become more of a cloud security service provider. The problem when you're trying to defend against the cloud, you have to defend from the end, the device outward, because we're all logging into the internet. There's only one place really where we're all logging into the internet, and that's at our computer or through our phone. We start from there, and then there's a principle I'm going to get into because I think we'll talk about it, it's a little more related to cloud security. I think FireEye feels a little bit, this is brutal, I hate saying this because I don't like denigrating companies, but I feel like it's 20th century security technology. That's so unfair. Their technology is better than that, but the world has materially changed and I don't think this technology has kept up with it, Anand.
Chokkavelu: Makes sense. You're against competitors who didn't exist just a few years ago and so they're going to be up to date, right?
Beyers: Right.
