Trend Micro Brings ‘Meaningful’ Enhancements to Cloud One

Trend Micro Virtual Perspectives Event—Longtime cybersecurity vendor Trend Micro is adding functionality to its Cloud One platform that will boost managed security service providers’ practices.

The vendor made the announcements on Thursday during its first-ever live virtual event. Like other companies, Trend Micro has opted to host customer and partner gatherings over the web until the COVID-19 pandemic passes. As such, Trend Micro shared news that its MSSPs are sure to embrace.

Scanning and Security

For starters, within the next couple of weeks, Cloud One will offer scanning for Amazon Web Service’s S3 storage servers, said Adam Boyle, vice president of hybrid cloud security at Trend Micro. Not long after, Trend Micro will debut the same capabilities for storage buckets on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Similarly, Cloud One’s government-grade network security is available and working in AWS, and remains in development for Azure, Boyle said.

In addition, on Friday, Trend Micro will release the preview mode of Cloud One infused with its cross-layer detection and response (XDR) technology. XDR pulls activity from all security layers. It then places that information into one data lake, then uses big data analytics to correlate threats and alert security personnel. What MSSPs may find most appealing is Trend Micro’s assertion that XDR in Cloud One provides fewer, yet more meaningful and higher-quality alerts.

Cloud One with XDR will work across compute, networking and storage, and across AWS, Azure and GCP and organizations’ own data centers.

As a refresher, Trend Micro developed Cloud One to serve as an all-in-one security solution. Too often, MSSPs and enterprises juggle different brands, portals and sign-ons for managing the various aspects of hybrid and multicloud infrastructure. Cloud One provides one console where administrators handle application, network and file storage security, and cloud security posture management. Trend Micro officially unveiled Cloud One last November; the vendor continues to beef up the platform with new features.

Trend Micro’s Wendy Moore

“Customers have a mix of legacy servers, virtualized data centers and newer services such as containers and serverless applications, all of which can be protected using Cloud One,” Wendy Moore, vice president of product marketing at Trend Micro, said at the time of the platform’s launch.

Expanded Functionalities

Trend Micro’s expanded functionalities for Cloud One come after the company bought Cloud Conformity, a prominent AWS technology partner, last year. Now, Trend Micro is intent on building its non-AWS competencies, as evidenced by its plans for Azure and GCP.

That comes as newly published data from IDC shows that Trend Micro claims almost one-third (29.5%, to be exact) of the hybrid cloud workload security market. Unidentified companies make up the next-largest chunk, at 28%, with Cisco trailing at 9.7%, Symantec at 9.2% and McAfee at 8.4%. However, this does not guarantee that Trend Micro will maintain its position.

“The future of the market … has not yet been decided,” Frank Dickson, program vice president within IDC’s Cybersecurity Products research practice, wrote in the new report, “Worldwide Hybrid Cloud Workload Security Market Shares, 2019: Vendor Growth Comes in All Shapes and Sizes.”

“An unusual mix of high-growth companies exist, looking to make inroads on Trend Micro’s dominance,” Dickson added.

Still in the Lead

Of course, that’s not to say those competitors will overtake Trend Micro. The vendor has stood at the forefront of cybersecurity for more than 30 years and shows no signs of slowing down. Indeed, it’s fair to say Trend Micro has shifted its efforts into overdrive as the coronavirus pandemic pushes organizations into the cloud and more end users into mobility.

Trend Micro’s Eva Chen

For example, the vendor tracked a 220-times increase in COVID-related spam between February and March. It also recorded a 260% jump in COVID-related malicious URL hits during that same time period. On top of that, misalignment and complexity also pose two of the biggest risks for organizations, said Eva Chen, co-founder and CEO of Trend Micro. Cloud One, especially, addresses these challenges, according to Trend Micro.

Dickson, for his part, seems to agree. As he commonly says, and repeated during “Perspectives,” “Complexity is the enemy of security.”

“Get off the hamster wheel,” he advised attendees. “The path that we’ve taken on cloud is very reactionary.”

MSSPs can help clients combat this situation by offering informed guidance.

“Do some planning to reduce the number of cloud environments, reduce the number of security tools you’re using, and do some future-proofing,” Dickson said. The idea is that, as time goes on, “you’re not creating complexity, but reducing complexity.”