Security must be driven down the technology stack, as threats migrate from targeting applications and operating systems to the hypervisor and hardware level, McAfee global chief technology officer George Kurtz told ZDNet Asia. The "proof point" is in the development of virtualisation, Kurtz said. While initially challenging in 1999 with the arrival of hypervisors and later Intel's introduction of Virtualisation Technology (VT) into its chips, virtualisation evolved to be "datacentre-ready". That approach was followed in security, he said. "It's really hardware-assisted security, just like virtualisation," he added. "If you could take a lot of the things that we would normally do in software and leverage the silicon to do that, it basically makes [security] faster and better — [and that means] faster performance and better efficacy in being able to protect our customers."