Not cost but Stability, Scalability & Security driving enterprises to move towards Cloud: Steve Quane

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global leader in cybersecurity solutions had their global executive Steve Quane, Executive VP, Network Defense and Hybrid Cloud Security in India recently, stressing on the unprecedented pace of infrastructure changes engulfing enterprises. He stressed on cloud adoption, particularly moving to ‘container’ and ‘server-less’ architecture having huge benefits for organizations. The benefits which translate not only to cost, but include stability, scalability and ultimately the security aspect. With respect to trends around the threat landscape in Asia, which includes India, he opined that he could draw parallels to what is happening globally, in that they are very similar. While there is still a significant amount of Ransomware activity currently, Crypto Mining will rise to equal Ransomware if not exceed it.

While delving on the ‘mentality shift’ of organizations sharing responsibilities, Steve said, “There is a new model that needs to be in place for cloud security that is different than on- premise. The word ‘hybrid’ is very specific here, the ability to live in both places at the same time. That is, to live in an older legacy network-based environment that you have complete control over, while moving to a cloud environment where you share responsibility with your service provider. For organizations that do make the shift, they find that the cloud security model is as-good-as if not better than their on- premise security model.”

On the role of next-gen technologies in security, Steve opined that the role of Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence (AI) would be to essentially sieve through data and find anomalies and trends that either humans can’t see or don’t have time to see. When it comes to blockchain, its application would be to help secure a very unsecure environment.

“People, Process and Procedures need to be addressed particularly in this age of impending data regulations and privacy regulations. Also, organizations are increasingly seen grappling with newer issues – How do we deal with AI driven security fighting AI driven threats? At some point the infrastructure fights itself. Interestingly, we have started to see attacks on AI done by AI”, he further added.

On Trend Micro’s cloud offering, Steve highlighted on their Connected Threat Defense approach. Their cloud offering – ‘Deep Security’ is tied to network-based IPS, which is in-turn tied to their sandboxing technologies. The ability to detect suspicious behavior anywhere in the enterprise environment and submit that malicious activity to a centralized investigation service is unique to anyone in the industry. The second aspect, is the ability to follow the workload, building the security profile around a computing workload and following it anywhere in the world from virtual infrastructure to multi-cloud. Trend Micro is one of the most critical partner for AWS, Azure and VMware in India and they work hand-in-hand with them to offer customers a seamless hassle free experience.

He emphasized the two big areas which are unique to Trend Micro. First being the Security Universities, where they plan to graduate about 300 to 400 security professionals a year, once they reach a particular scale. With presence in Egypt and Brazil they now plan to expand to Eastern Europe and Asia as well. The second one being around identifying talent through Ethical hacking, and the tremendous growth witnessed around The Zero Day initiative bug bounty program which has roughly 3500 researchers. He opined that Asia has lost the sheen of being the land of the ethical hackers, and the most prolific at that, with the decrease in ethical hacking in Asia. Also, they plan to organize probably the biggest hacking event in the world, called Pwn2Own scheduled next month, with an estimated prize money of USD 2 million for the grabs.

Close to home, Nilesh Jain, Vice President – South East Asia and India, Trend Micro, said, “In India, we are seeing two trends, very specifically to large enterprises. One, is the adoption of new technologies of AI, Big Data & Blockchain. Secondly, it’s the cloud adoption related migration happening across sectors. Also, customers are increasingly evaluating vendors who can deliver EDR (endpoint detection and response) as well as who can deliver security on Cloud, and move on those latest technologies faster.”

In India, Trend Micro has invested heavily into manpower, growing their team size three times in the last three and a half years, with separate teams for government, large enterprises and commercial business. “Our major investment is in engaging and developing the different categories of channel partners in India. We are building a big team for channels, which includes, channel sales, channel technical and channel services. There are channel partners who are doing large sized infrastructure projects, there are pure-play MSSP (Managed Security Service Providers) partners, and there are largely cloud services partners”, he further added.