Trend Micro Joins The Trend Towards Consolidated Security Platforms

The company says its new unified cybersecurity platform will offer channel partners a more “holistic” security solution.

Trend Micro has launched a new unified cybersecurity platform it says will make it easier and more efficient for channel partners and customers to view and assess their attack surfaces and risk postures.

Touting its new Trend Micro One as a major step toward 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, “continuous lifecycle of risk and threat assessment with attack surface discovery, cyber risk analysis, and threat mitigation and response.”

Trend Micro said it will be working with an array of technology partners – including Google Cloud, Microsoft, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Slack, Qualys, Rapid7, Splunk, and Tenable – to pull data from their products in order to enhance customers’ views and assessments of lurking cyber dangers.

“We’re basically connecting all of 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 one platform, Trend Micro is effectively offering end-users a more efficient and simple way to manage and monitor the literally dozens of security-related products a company may be currently using 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 on different platforms.

The main benefit of Trend Micro One for channel partners, Moore said, is that it addresses the demand from customers 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 amount of consolidation is welcome by channel partners and others who he said are “overwhelmed” by the sheer number of security vendors and products on the market today.

“Whether integrating or consolidating products, I think it’s great,” he said. “I do believe consolidations in the long-run are beneficial to MSPs.”

Moore said Trend Micro plans to help solution provider partners in deploying its new integrated security platform.

“We are very, very big on the channel,” said Moore, noting that “99 percent” of Trend Micro’s current revenues come via the channel.

In announcing its new unified platform earlier this week, Trend Micro touted a recent Gartner study that said security-product consolidation is the wave of the future.

In an interview with CRN, Charlie Winckless, a senior analyst at Gartner and one of the study’s authors, said he hasn’t fully reviewed Trend Micro’s new unified platform. But the firm is clearly attempting to meet the demand for more integrated and consolidated security systems, he said.

“They’re certainly trying to create an efficiency,” he said. “They’re trying to make it easier to use.”

But Dror Liwer, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Coro, a New York-based cybersecurity technology vendor, questioned whether Trend Micro has really produced the kind of useful “all in one” cybersecurity product that he says businesses and organizations want and need.

“TrendMicro One is an impressive cloud security platform, but is far from being an all-in-one” system because of its reliance on other vendors’ data and what he described as gaps in its security coverage, said Liwer, whose firm develops what he calls a simple, 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 develop a more unified and effective security platform for customers.