Trend Micro has developed a major strategy to address the SMB security market in India. Mr Greg Boyle, Global Product Marketing Manager, Worry-Free Business Security Services, Trend Micro, recently visited India to announce their strategy and vision for this market. We at ‘InfoSecurity’ spoke to him during his visit to understand Trend Micro’s strategy better and to have an in-depth insight of their strength to address this market.

Mr Greg Boyle, Global Product Marketing Manager, Worry-Free Business Security Services, Trend Micro

Q1. Why does Trend Micro still project itself as an only antivirus and content security solution provider, considering the global emerging market of integrated security solution, specifically for SMB segment?

Trend Micro is focused on ensuring we live in a world where it is safe for exchanging digital information, and we have grown as a company for over 20 years through innovation and developing technologies that a specifically designed to protect users and companies from the ever changing threats on the web. Today we see a new threat developed every 1.5 seconds and in order for a technology to truly be effective and stay ahead of these threats, not just stay up to date with these threats, the resources of the company building these solutions needs to be laser-beam focused on content security and not distracted by other avenues of computing. Content Security is more than anti-virus and you will see in the range of solutions from Trend Micro that providing protection against all forms of threats in a way or “form factor” that suits the user is of paramount importance, it is all about security that fits.

Q2. Considering the growing sophisticated cyber crimes, how strongly does Trend Micro stand today to combat the situation?

At Trend Micro we made a concentrated effort and investment starting years ago to develop new technologies that would address the exponential growth in malware. Traditional approaches of pattern matching and deployment are unable to keep up with today’s threat growth. It is estimated that by 2015 we will see over 25,000 new threats released every hour. Therefore constantly updating signature files and pushing them to computers on a regular basis will not scale to meet today’s and tomorrow’s threat protection requirements. Instead we are focusing our development efforts on providing threat prevention, it is all about stopping threats at their source before they have a chance to enter a user’s computer or network, with the help of our own technology called ‘Smart Protection Network’.

Q3. What is latest movement in SMB security market? How do SMBs recognize the importance of high level information security requirements for combating blended threats?

The SMB security market is rapidly changing as more and more companies engage a mobile workforce. 2 years ago about 40% of small business had employees working outside their office, that number is now around 65-70%. This means that business data is travelling around the country and globe on machines that are removed from the confines of an office network and the security that is in place there. They are using wireless hotspots in hotels, airports, at home or even coffee shops, the data on them is o less important than it was a year ago but now that they are out in the open they are potentially more at risk. And small businesses while still not having IT skills in house are becoming more IT aware and more security aware, they want visibility of their security from a high level, they want to be sure that machines are being scanned and updated and that their business data is safe.

Q4. Do you find any major difference in behaviour of Indian SMB security market in comparison of rest global market?

I think the major difference with the Indian market place is that it is still undergoing dramatic growth, that some users are still fairly un-aware of the differences in security technologies and that they are spoiled for choice in terms of not only security technologies available because every vendor wants to be part of the growth but also the choice of local IT resellers or partners with over 15,000 in India. All of this leads to very aggressive competition and competition that unfortunately a lot of the time is driven by price rather than value and technology benefits.

Q5. Should SMBs go for integrated security solution implementation within organization or should go for managed/hosted security service?

It comes down to security that fits. What is right for one customer is not right for another, at Trend Micro we are providing our technology in ways that can suit different customer situations. We have integrated on-premise solutions that can be installed and controlled on corporate networks but the same technology is also available to users who don’t want the overhead of managing this in-house and want the “heavy-lifting” to be done in Trend Micro datacenters where security experts can monitor the infrastructure.

Q6. Today industry is preparing itself for virtualization and cloud computing model. Will it bring any major impact for SMBs in their security architecture as well as expenditure?

Public cloud has security implications in that SMB need to be aware of the type of data being sent to cloud based services and ensure that whatever information they store in the cloud is secure. From a virtualization perspective obviously it provides benefits in terms of fast provisioning of new services and resource utilization the security aspect can create its own unique needs. While it is quick to bring a new server online, the security settings and packages that come online with it will need to be customized for the specific use of the server – hence increased management and security knowledge are required, performance should also be a consideration especially in the SMB space where the size/speed of the servers in use may be limited for example a physical box with 4 VMs each with security installed could potentially have four scans happening at one time all competing for resources so planning and skill sets again come into play to have the architecture configured appropriately. And then finally in a virtualized environment the traffic between VMs is a potential risk factor and organizations need to look at scanning technology that can ensure this traffic is not infected.

Q7. As SMBs more and more leaning towards mobile workforce model, can Trend Micro prvide end-to-end security for these mobile workforce?

I alluded to this earlier and with the launch of our new Worry-free Business Security Services solution we are able to provide companies with a product that can ensure their users are protected wherever they are connected. By leveraging a web based management infrastructure and the smart protection network companies can have all computers connected to their security system regardless of whether they are connected to a LAN or not. This ensures IT has control and visibility of mobile machines all of the time.

Q8. How does today Trend Micro evaluate Indian SMB security market and what strategy has Trend Micro adopted to educate and protect them from complicated, multi-dimensional threats, even in a most uncertain global economy?

With limited resources, time and IT expertise, it's challenging for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to find anti-virus and anti-spam systems that work. As viruses and worms continue to wreak havoc over the Internet, infecting business networks of all shapes and sizes, smaller business owners know their data is at risk. Today’s threat landscape is about volume and profit with the majority of threats coming from the Web. Cybercriminals are releasing new threats every 1.5 seconds in order to avoid detection.
At Trend Micro, we’ve spent the last 5 years developing our Smart Protection Network cloud-client infrastructure and we own all the technology. It sources threats from millions of sensors, honeypots, customers and partners around the world in order to gather the latest threat intelligence.  The Smart Protection Network is integrated into all of our solutions and TrendLabs researches analyze terabytes of threat data every day. By correlating this information across multiple threat vectors – email, file and Web, we are able to provide proactive protection faster than anyone else in this industry.  It’s blocking billions of threats every day. Other vendors have just started adding in the cloud protection or reputation services to one or two of their products at most and usually only covering one or two threat vectors – they don’t have it throughout their product line, they don’t correlate across the multiple threat vectors, and they don’t have feedback automatically coming from and integrating into consumer, business and partner products around the world.

Q9. How do you want to see SMB security market in India in next 2-3 years?

The security landscape has been seeing new threats growing explosively in number and complexity -- attacks that exploit the vulnerabilities of applications, insider sabotages, identity fraud and unauthorized access to corporate systems and networks. Regulatory compliance requirement is also a significant driver for security solutions

—By: Mr Greg Boyle, Global Product Marketing Manager, Worry-Free Business Security Services, Trend Micro