By Cat Yong
The statistics for cybercriminal and cyber threat activities are overwhelming to say the least. According to Trend Micro’s Southeast Asia managing director, Goh Chee Hoh, a threat is created every second and a cyber intrusion happens every 5 minutes. Scarier yet is that 90% of enterprises have malware, and 75% have one or more bots.
But enterprises can’t afford to hold back and be risk-averse. To do so will be detrimental in today’s fast-paced, ever-evolving business arena. Technologies like the Internet, mobile devices and more exist to empower businesses. Enterprises have to find ways to manage the risks involved in the usage of these and upcoming future technologies.
Hole-y network
Goh also opined that information is the new form of digital currency that cybercriminals want to steal from us using more and more inventive methods.
“Security used to be about creating perimeters. But this doesn’t work anymore. Consumerisation trends like social, mobility and collaboration, as well as cloud and virtualisation; which are all necessary technologies; keep causing information to go in and out of this perimeter.
“We have to evolve the security architecture from perimeter defense. It’s not anymore just about protection from outside in, but from inside out.”
Addressing today’s trends
No doubt, there has to be end-to-end protection, from machines behind the corporate firewall, all the way to machines that are outside it as well.
For Trend Micro, security is about blanketing the 3Cs of consumerisation, cyber threats and cloud & data centre with a smart protection network (SPN). Key to this is a centralised policy and single administration view to provision security services like anti-malware, data loss prevention (DLP), encryption, mobile security and more.
SPN uses big data analytics to process over 4TB of data collected in the cloud, to identify threats, deliver proactive protection and secure data faster. Goh said, “It is a combo of signature-based anti-malware, a global network of threat intelligence that uses correlations to try track and trace the whole network and source of a malware. We also have a huge data centre presence around the world to handle billions of queries every day.”
From the cloud and data centre perspective
Synching and backup is important. Trend Micro offers a secure way to do this for mobile data. This service can be done in a few ways, one being the hosted model whereby Trend Micro’s own data centres sync and backup customers’ data. The security solution provider also partners with telcos which host data and offer backup/sync services in a B2C way.
Large enterprises may opt to host their data in their own private data centres. Trend Micro’s software would be implemented so enterprises can build on-premise backup solutions. Goh listed available Trend Micro solutions for the enterprise ranging from anti-malware, intrusion prevention, integrity monitoring and firewalls, to log inspections, web reputation and encryption. “These solutions are on an open, automated and scalable server security platform.”
Trend Micro is also a strong contender in the virtualised security space. Goh said, “By 2016, it is forcecasted that 71% of server workloads will be virtualised.”
No doubt, they have had to be prepared for that eventual reality as well and the security vendor is already a technology leader on virtualised platforms – it claims the honour of being the first company in the world to have agentless, virtualised security. Goh explained, “This means there is no impact on performance and scalability no matter how many virtual machines are on the server.”
Having had this security solution called Deep Security for more than two years, Goh shared that Trend Micro is starting a new level of industry standard. “Trend Micro is recognised by IDC as a market leader in server and virtualisation security, with the first agentless security platform built for VMware.
“Our server and virtualisation security solution, Deep Security, offers the broadest and deepest integration with VMware products and it is in its fourth generation of integration with VMware. In addition to its integration with VMware vShield, an upcoming version of Deep Security will also integrate with VMware vCenter for automatic and instantaneous security for new virtual machines in the network, and will monitor the integrity of the virtualisation hypervisor i.e. we will know if a hacker tries to copy, change or remove its system files. The solution also integrates with VMware vCloud Director for enabling security in VMware-based clouds.”
Goh further explained that Deep Security will also integrate with VMware vCloud Director as well as with Amazon AWS to enable their enterprise customers and service provider partners to extend their corporate security policies to workloads in the public cloud, and manage both data centre and cloud workloads from a single pane of glass. Deep Security will support a true multi-tenant architecture allowing separate tenants or business units to manage policies independently and in a self-service manner.
“We are working with virtualisation vendor, VMware, and now we have put agentless virtualised security solutions onto the hypervisor-level, as well, with Deep Security 9.” This means Trend Micro has succeeded at extending security and compliance of virtualised systems right to the hypervisor level as well.
Deep Security overall, is designed to provide server, application and data security across physical, virtual and public/private/hybrid cloud environments. It works together with Trend Micro’s Secure Cloud policy- setting, key management and data encryption solution, for added security and data protection.
SecureCloud is offered as a software application or software-as-a-service, and gives businesses control of its own encryption keys, and freedom to encrypt data in virtual data centres or the cloud. Goh added, “The risks of multi-tenancy can also be mitigated with encryption of data.”
Big bad Web
Goh also has opinions about cyber threats from malware, worms , viruses and other nasties. “The threat landscape has changed from a broad base infection to targeted and customised attacks – also known as Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). Over the last 2 years, we’ve seen APTs populating the news headlines with high profile data breaches across different industries and nation states. APTs have clearly proven their ability to evade existing security controls such as antivirus, next generation firewall, and network IDS/IPS – to remain undetected for extended periods, and to extract corporate data or intellectual property.”
This is where Trend Micro’s Deep Discovery appliance comes into play. This specialised threat detection appliance plugs into the network and provides organisations with a network-wide visibility, insight, and control to combat APTs and targeted attacks. Goh described, “With its specialised inspection engines and custom sandbox simulation, Deep Discovery inspects the network traffic identify zero-day malware, malicious communications, and attacker activities on the internal network that are invisible to standard security defences such as intrusion detection systems.
Turning security approaches on its head
In 2008, Trend Micro made the tough decision not to rely solely on traditional virus patterns and introduced a smart protection infrastructure technology instead. Goh said, “Any vendor that solely depends on virus patterns are unable to response promptly, effectively and efficiently in fighting the increasingly new malware attack.”
“Devices just don’t have the processing power to handle virus patterns that are getting bigger and bigger all the time. With virus patterns on the cloud instead, there is less stress on device and network bandwidth. It is almost real-time synching. “
At all layers, Trend Micro actually has presence solutions or ‘agents’ that are communicating back to the cloud about threat information. Because of this, responses are accurate and can be almost instantaneous.
“To be able to correlate the data, we need all the layers. Security vendors that don’t have point solutions at end products; how can they have this depth of insight?” Goh pointed out.
Go-to market
Trend Micro still gains major revenues from their traditional solutions; about 80%. “But it’s slow growth. The major growth is from (solutions) for consumerisation, cloud and cyber threats. We expect 3-digit growth in 3 to 5 years.
“The whole world is heading towards cloud-client architecture.”
As a result, they started initiatives like the Cloud Sec conference, and work closely with global cloud security alliances. Besides the traditional partners and system integrators, Goh also mentioned there has been high growth of strategic partners that specialise in APT, quality assurance standards like ISO27001 and virtualisation.
Trend Micro is also starting to see significant revenue generation, by partnering with cloud service providers. “Most cloud service providers are from the telco segment. We are looking to partner with them, as well as big cloud players like HP, IBM, Dell.”
The security specialist is also geared for growth. Revenue has mostly come from the enterprise segment, but they are slowly targeting the SMBs as well, by leveraging their volume-focused silver partners.
The government segment is also shaping up to be lucrative. Partnerships with major telco players for example, to build out clouds for government agencies can only mean growth in terms of professional consultancy services and readying security for an ever increasing number of virtual machines.
