Trend Micro shines a light on its new cybersecurity solutions

Last week, Trend Micro came to Boston for its annual Trend Insights industry analyst event. The company provided an overview of its business, products, and strategy.  Here are a few of my take-aways:

1. Trend Micro is prepared for the next chapter in endpoint security. To maintain its market leadership, Trend Micro is rolling out Apex One, its newest endpoint security product. Apex One provides more prevention/detection capabilities while consolidating all endpoint security functions onto a single agent. Trend Micro has also decided to swim against the industry tide by including EDR as part of its core commercial endpoint security product (note: EDR requires a licensing change), thus all customers who upgrade will get Trend Micro EDR, alleviating the need to shop elsewhere. Apex One will be an easy decision for existing Trend Micro customers and may be an attractive alternative for CISOs looking for an endpoint security solution will all the bells and whistles.
2. Trend Micro product strategy: Better together. Trend Micro talks about connected threat defense, which brings together several its individual endpoint, network, and cloud products together as an integrated cybersecurity technology architecture. Good timing, as ESG research indicates that 62% of organizations would be willing to buy a majority of their cybersecurity products from a single enterprise-class vendor. For example, TippingPoint IDS/IPS is tightly integrated with Deep Discovery, Trend Micro’s malware detection sandbox, while Deep Security, Trend Micro’s cloud workload security offering, integrates with both of these products. As part of its business strategy, Trend Micro is working with customers to replace discrete point tools with Trend Micro products and reap integration benefits such as improved threat prevention/detection while streamlining security operations.
3. Moving toward managed services. While Trend Micro engineered its EDR offering for ease of use, it recognizes that many organizations don’t have the resources or skills to deploy, learn, or operate detection/response tools on their own. To work with these customers, Trend Micro is rolling out a managed detection and response service (MDR) as a complement to its products. Furthermore, Trend Micro is spinning out a new company called Cysiv, which offers several other advanced managed security services. With these moves, Trend Micro is demonstrating that it wants to play a direct role in the growing market for security services – rather than an indirect role as an arms dealer alone.
4. All in on cloud security. Trend Micro jumped on the server virtualization and cloud computing bandwagons early by forming tight partnerships with VMware, Amazon, and Microsoft. Now that every other established vendor and VC-backed startup is all in on the cloud, Trend Micro is moving beyond basic cloud security support. For example, Trend Micro cloud security products are tightly-coupled with its connected threat defense for prevention/detection. From a cloud perspective, Trend Micro has gotten very familiar with application developers and DevOps to make sure that Trend Micro cloud security products fit seamlessly into a CI/CD pipeline. Trend Micro has also expanded its purview to cover containers micro-services, and even cloud-based application security.  In this way, Trend Micro is aligning with cloud innovation and culture – not just hawking security products.
5. More business investment. Over the past five years, Trend Micro business has gone through some significant shifts. For example, a larger percentage of the company’s revenue comes from commercial sales rather than consumer sales, while Trend Micro has seen rapid market growth in North America. Trend Micro will hire engineers, expand sales staff, and service channel partners to keep this momentum going. 

In my humble opinion, Trend Micro remains a bit of a diamond in the rough — its security expertise and advanced technologies are not as well known in the market as they should be. This may be due to the company’s engineering focus and humble corporate culture. With the security market on fire, however, Trend Micro needs to do more to get the word out, as it’s too easy to get lost in the cacophony of noise coming from the security technology market these days.

Marketing aside, Trend Micro customers really like and trust the company, so it must be doing something right. It’s also quite refreshing to meet with Trend Micro because the company truly understand all aspects of cybersecurity — challenges, requirements, skills, threat mitigation, incident response, etc. 

In a world filled with cybersecurity flim-flam, Trend Micro is a breadth of fresh air. The company’s challenge is to get more CISOs and cybersecurity pros to realize this.