A conversation with Sharda Tickoo, Technical Director at Trend Micro on Unified Cybersecurity, value proposition the brand offers, learnings from cybersecurity challenges of 2022 and more
“A recent report by World Economic Forum states that the world currently lacks 3 million cybersecurity professionals. The cybersecurity industry is no stranger to skills shortage.
Sharda Tickoo, Technical Director, Trend Micro
Why unified cybersecurity is gaining popularity in the current evolving threat landscape?
As organisations and security teams struggle to manage the increasing complexity introduced by digital transformation, data privacy, and more, the need for a unified cybersecurity platform has never been more crucial. A unified cybersecurity platform enables businesses to understand, communicate, and mitigate cyber risk across the enterprise. SecOps teams can use the platform to continuously discover their ever-changing attack surface, understand and prioritise vulnerabilities, rapidly detect and respond to threats, and apply the right security at the right time to mitigate risk. Moreover, built-in security capabilities like XDR, risk insights, threat assessment, and more, help the security operations team be more effective with fewer resources.
What are some of the key competitive advantages of unified cybersecurity offering by Trend Micro?Trend Micro’s unique offering, “Trend Micro One,” is an ecosystem of native & third-party integrations that delivers deep activity data across email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads, and networks to provide visibility & control across the entire attack surface. It offers multiple benefits to businesses, such as the ability to understand, communicate, and mitigate risks entirely. The threat mitigation is supported by unparalleled threat and vulnerability insights from our global research team and the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative, our vulnerability disclosure program. This not only helps in enhancing cyber resilience by continuously discovering the attack surface, but also prioritizes vulnerabilities, which then helps in faster mitigation of real threats. Trend Micro One simplifies security operations and eliminates the blind spots by deploying a central visibility and analysis of your risk posture across your entire environment, including risk indicators and insights from third-party ecosystem solutions.
The platform aids in lowering the impact on security teams, enabling them to be more effective with fewer resources through automation, prioritised alerts and insights, and augmenting security teams with expert services like Managed XDR, threat assessment, and incident response.
Furthermore, the platform enables vendor consolidation and business agility by delivering multiple market-leading capabilities for protecting cloud, endpoint, email, network, and IoT environments. This also includes detection and response for cyber insurance requirements.
What according to you are some of the key cybersecurity challenges organizations are facing in 2022 and what should they learn from it?
The rise of ransomware attacks has been one of the most significant and pressing problems for security teams this year. The ransomware threat landscape has continued to evolve with new players and lucrative monetization methods. We are also seeing increase in Identity compromise thereby leading to a cyber breach. Moreover, attackers continue to target both public and private sectors.
There was also an increase in cloud-based attacks this year. On one hand, where the adoption of the cloud has reduced operational cost and increased efficiency, it has also opened the gates to data security breaches; lack of encryption, authentication, and improper configuration of the cloud setups are some of the key reasons for compromised data security.
Disconnected security layers and siloed tools also led to an increase in false positives that in turn stemmed up another challenge of false negatives – legitimate threats sneaking under the radar. Lastly, another prominent challenge that the industry is facing right now is talent crunch. A recent report by World Economic Forum states that the world currently lacks 3 million cybersecurity professionals. The cybersecurity industry is no stranger to skills shortage.
The learning that carves out of these challenges is this: Businesses need to protect their workers by instituting access control policies, even if they work remotely. When it comes to defending against phishing scams, cybersecurity education and knowledge are key. Lastly, along with building a resilient cybersecurity workforce, having a strong risk management strategy in place for an organization’s digital attack surface is of utmost essence. A unified cybersecurity platform will help with managing the entire lifecycle of the digital attack surface.
What are the differentiators that Trend Micro bring to this market?
The key differentiator that we bring to this market is our unified cybersecurity platform that enables vendor consolidation with multiple market-leading security capabilities and deep integration with the IT environment. Through our products and services, we ensure ease of deployment, ease of licensing & bundled services. Our unified platform provides a centralized view of the organization’s attack surface and risk index that enables them to prioritise the remediation measure thereby helping security leaders drastically reduce threat investigation & response time from months to few hours.
Can you elaborate on two of the biggest highlights at Trend Micro over the last six months?
Over the last six months, we’ve successfully discovered and mitigated over 94 billion threats by leveraging over 250 million global sensors to deliver better insights and stop threats faster. We have also helped protect over five lakh organisations around the world who trust us for their various security requirements. Moreover, we have deployed multiple regional data centers around the world, enabling our customers to address both cybersecurity and data privacy requirements, which helped us in managing over 5 trillion threat queries.
In August, we celebrated our continued leadership in the fast-growing global market for cloud security, as per the latest IDC market share report on Cloud Workload Security. We also successfully organised our Annual Partners Day in June 2022 wherein our focus was to further empower our partners and strengthen our channel partner ecosystem in India. During the three-day event, we elaborated on various ways to support our partners in their transformational journeys and shared insights on the latest trends in cybersecurity.
“Cybersecurity education, building a resilient cybersecurity workforce, having a strong risk management strategy in place for an organization’s digital attack surface is of utmost importance’’
Can you elaborate on your market approach?
We are a 100% partner driven organization. Post the pandemic, there was a major change: customers tend to prefer a Pay As You Go Model as compared to multi-year contracts. We have shifted to a SaaS model, which means all of our solutions can be delivered on the cloud, so we are well adjusted with this change. We are also aware that certain regulated sectors may still need an on-premise approach and hence we have a hybrid strategy going on for certain segments. Our major focus is also on creating a unified cybersecurity platform so that our customers get a centralized view of their organization’s digital attack surface, helping them reduce their response time from months to few hours.
How Trend Micro’s unified cybersecurity platform protects organizations across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints?
Trend Micro’s unified cybersecurity platform, Trend Micro One, protects organizations across the endpoints by increasing visibility across their dynamic attack surface, assessing and prioritising risks, identifying identity based threats, mapping it with industry standards like MITRE framework which helps in responding with the right security at the right time. Trend Micro Sensors deployed across endpoint, network, email and cloud also take remediation actions basis the visibility provided by the platform. It is a holistic cybersecurity platform that ensures no loopholes exists in any defensive measures. The platform enables vendor consolidation with multiple market-leading security capabilities and deep integration with your IT environment, simplifying security and helping you detect and stop breaches faster. It also provides risk and posture visibility for Zero trust Initiatives through continual monitoring, enabling more resilience against risks and automation of risk-based decisions.
