Neil MacDonald is a vice president, distinguished analyst and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research, based in Stamford, Connecticut. Mr. MacDonald is a member of Gartner's information security and privacy research team, focusing on operating system and application-level security strategies. Specific research areas include Windows security, host-based intrusion prevention systems, converged endpoint security, service-oriented application security, business process management security and the integration of security into the application development process.

Mr. MacDonald joined Gartner in 1995 as an analyst in Gartner's 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 2001-2003, Mr. MacDonald 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 information technology to better run their business. When this research team was folded back into the main research organization in 2004, Mr. MacDonald rejoined the Information Security research team. Prior to joining Gartner, Mr. MacDonald 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 network.