by Bharat Mistry
Modern organisations are laser-focused on business agility and the customer experience. To help them respond quicker to changing market demands they are turning to the hybrid cloud and DevOps. But this kind of innovation-centric digital growth can only be achieved with a strong and secure foundation. Trend Micro was one of the first to spot this emerging trend a decade ago, and today we’re recognised as the market leader.
In fact, we’re celebrating again, having just been named the
“dominant leader” in IDC’s latest
report, Worldwide Software Defined Compute Workload Security Market
Shares, 2018.
Why SDC workloads matter
As the IDC report explains, software-defined compute (SDC) covers a large
number of abstraction technologies across the system software stack. Although
technically a subset of endpoint security, SDC workload security is primarily
designed to protect VMs, containers and cloud system software — and as such is
commonly used in the context of cloud environments. Tools in this category can
include things like anti-malware, firewall, host intrusion detection,
application control and integrity monitoring.
Why does this matter? Because increasingly the cloud, and
therefore VMs and containers, is being used to develop and support the
microservices-based applications needed to drive faster, more responsive
customer-facing experiences. But as we predict in our new report, The
New Norm, these environments are set to come under much greater
scrutiny by hackers over the coming decade. Cloud platforms are particularly at
risk from code injection attacks, either directly or via third-party libraries,
while containers and serverless architectures could be exploited because they
contain vulnerable shared code components.
This poses an existential threat to modern businesses. If
your cloud systems and apps get hacked, digital growth efforts could be halted
in their tracks.
A long journey
Trend Micro’s share of the SDC workload security market now stands at over
two-fifths, nearly triple its nearest competitor, according to IDC. That’s due
in part to our vision in this space. Back in 2009 we acquired a little-known host-based
intrusion-prevention and firewall software provider called Third Brigade. It
was the start of a long journey, as we steadily built out our capabilities for virtual,
hybrid cloud and container environments.
Today we offer comprehensive security across physical,
virtual and hybrid cloud environments from a single pane of glass with tight
integration into AWS, Azure and GCP. Trend Micro has also focused on automation
and security-as-code to embed seamless protection into DevOps pipelines,
including pre-runtime scanning of container images.
Most recently, we released XDR, which correlates data across
email, network, endpoint, server and cloud workloads to spot and block malicious
workload activity. And we bought leading cloud security posture management firm
Cloud Conformity to tackle misconfiguration and compliance/governance
challenges.
All of these capabilities and more will soon be offered as
part of a holistic Cloud One solution that allows organisations to receive
automated protection from a single console — minimising risk, management
overheads and billing issues. Trend Micro is always looking one step ahead to
provide protection where you need it.
