Trend Micro has launched a new unified cybersecurity platform that it says will make it easier and more efficient for channel partners and customers to view and assess their attack surfaces and risk postures.
Introducing its new Trend Micro One as a major step towards consolidating security products on a single platform, the company said it will offer a full suite of its security products to provide, among other things, “a cycle of continuous life of risk and threat assessment with attack surface discovery, cyber risk analysis, and threat mitigation and response.
Trend Micro said it will work with an array of technology partners – including Google Cloud, Microsoft, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Slack, Qualys, Rapid7, Splunk and Tenable – to extract data from their products to improve customers. ‘ cyber threat opinions and assessments.
“We’re basically connecting all these different products so they can share with each other,” said Wendy Moore, vice president of product marketing at Trend Micro.
By putting more security features on a single platform, Trend Micro is effectively giving end users a more efficient and easier way to manage and monitor the dozens of security-related products an organization may currently use for protection, company officials say.
In recent years, channel partners and their customers have increasingly complained about the flood of new security products, offered by a dizzying array of vendors, and the difficulty of monitoring them across different platforms.
The main benefit of Trend Micro One for channel partners, Moore said, is that it meets customer demand for more and better security products on fewer platforms.
“[Channel partners] are able to provide holistic value to their customers,” she said.
Paco Lebron, president and CEO of ProdigyTeks, a Chicago-based MSP, said any consolidation is welcome for channel partners and others who he says are “overwhelmed” by the sheer number of vendors and of security products on the market today.
“Whether it’s integrating or consolidating products, I think that’s great,” he said. “I think long-term consolidations are good for MSPs.”
Moore said Trend Micro plans to help solution provider partners deploy its new integrated security platform.
“We’re very, very big on the channel,” Moore said, noting that “99%” of Trend Micro’s current revenue comes from the channel.
In announcing its new unified platform earlier this week, Trend Micro touted a recent Gartner study that said consolidation of security products is the wave of the future.
In an interview with CRN, Charlie Winckless, senior analyst at Gartner and one of the study’s authors, said he hadn’t fully reviewed Trend Micro’s new unified platform. But the company is clearly trying to meet the demand for more integrated and consolidated security systems, he said.
“They’re definitely trying to create efficiency,” he said. “They’re trying to make it easier to use.”
But Dror Liwer, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Coro, a New York-based cybersecurity technology provider, wondered if Trend Micro had really produced the kind of useful “all-in-one” cybersecurity product he says businesses and organizations want and need. .
“TrendMicro One is an impressive cloud security platform, but is far from an all-in-one system” due to its reliance on data from other vendors and what it described as gaps in its security blanket, said Liwer, whose company is developing what he calls a simple and easy-to-use “all-in-one” security platform.
In a statement, Kevin Simzer, COO of Trend Micro, said his company is proud to have partnered with other companies to build a more unified and effective security platform for customers.
