Trend Micro’s Eva Chen pays a visit

Good morning!

Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen’s head has been in the clouds of late. In a visit to our offices yesterday, she explained why.

Chen didn’t have any fresh news to deliver. This was more about talking up the announcements Trend Micro made at RSA last month. One thing was clear — she’s a true believer in cloud computing as a security enabler.

Of the two product announcements Trend Micro made last month, Chen said her company’s strategy is to help enterprises benefit from virtualization and cloud computing without bruising their security.

Trend Micro unveiled SecureCloud 1.1 for enterprise data protection through encryption in the cloud, and Deep Security 7.5 Update 1.

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Here’s a more technical description of these product releases, pulled from the materials Chen brought along:

Trend Micro SecureCloud enhances and extends the customer’s security and data protection as it evolves from virtualization to private and public clouds. Through the use of encryption and policy-based key management, SecureCloud protects data in the cloud and allows the flexibility to move between cloud vendors without being tied to any one provider’s encryption system.

SecureCloud gives control over how and where data is accessed by authenticating the identity and integrity of servers requesting access to secure storage volumes. It defends information against unauthorized disclosure or theft, helps ensure compliance with encryption requirements and automatically facilitates the release of encryption keys.

Advances delivered in this latest SecureCloud release give enterprises additional control over their cloud data. Now customers can manage their encryption keys for Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus and VMware vCloud environments from Trend Micro’s hosted SecureCloud service or from a SecureCloud key server running in their own physical data centers.

Trend Micro Deep Security provides advanced protection for virtualized systems. The current version of Deep Security announced in August 2010 (please see press release here) added agentless anti-malware to an array of other specialized security technologies comprising IDS/IPS, web application protection, firewall, integrity monitoring and log inspection modules. Deep Security is tightly integrated with VMware vShield Endpoint, thereby allowing Trend Micro to provide anti-malware and intrusion prevention for VMs in an agentless manner without requiring a third-party agent to be installed on each VM, thereby consuming fewer VMware vSphere system resources and enabling higher VM densities. one-stop view of latest business threats. We created it for you! Bookmark it! Use it!

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While we didn’t discuss it in the meeting, Trend Micro has also been pushing a program to protect kids from social networking threats.

Trend Micro Online Guardian for Families is the company’s first product designed for parents concerned about their kids’ social networking activities. It has an array of parental controls, social network monitoring, and Internet filtering.

Chen talking up cloud security wasn’t surprising. At RSA last month, that was THE ISSUE. The showroom floor was jammed with vendor exhibits touting their cloud security products.

Some attendees groused that the hype around the cloud was a bit overbearing.

Still, my observation is that a lot of companies are only beginning to explore the cloud. I’ve talked to plenty of CSOs whose companies are putting certain assets into the cloud, but with caution. Others have decided to dive deep into the cloud, but I talk to more of the former than the latter.

One thing was clear yesterday: Chen is full of enthusiasm when it comes to the cloud’s potential to move security along.

Expect a lot more from her on the issue in the months to come.

–Bill Brenner