Ransomware will continue to grow in 2018: Trend Micro

Kevin Simzer, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing speaks about Trend Micro's channel strategies and plans in APAC region

Could you please share your insights around major initiatives and focus areas of Trend Micro globally?

Kevin: Overall, the cyber security landscape has been a busy place, and we have been doing better than many of the other competitors. One is from a strategy perspective - we have identified the opportunities for growth within the cyber security landscape, and we have done a good job on that. The market is well aware that we have a strong endpoint business (and that continues to do well and grow), a business that we’ve built up over the last 7 years around cloud and virtualization, and server security. And then over the last couple of years, we have been doing a lot to build our overall position from a network standpoint.

When we look at the market, it is around USD 15 billion addressable market for us. We have market leading solutions in all of those spaces. We identified the areas that we are going to focus on and we’ve been going after that. These help in driving our numbers up and we are looking at driving a double digit growth.

We are all looking for the next wave and some of our hot areas that we are getting excited about. Over the next 10 years, IoT is going to play a big role. We are focused on organic development and we’ve been building a number of offerings, tool kits, and products in small businesses and enterprises in IoT environment. Some of the exciting new developments that we are focusing on is on creating our Venture Capital arm of the company. We’ve invested USD 100 million in venture capital firm and the primary focus is a little bit different from what other people are doing. Our focus is not on security specifically, it’s actually on the IoT and next generation landscape of applications that are there.

We are going to be announcing in the next couple of months that we already have done a couple of deals. We already have three deals done before we actually went public. We are very excited about things around Blockchain, IoT, and applications that might shake the future. We have got some interesting investments and we have got some good partners that we’ve aligned with from a venture capital standpoint.

We want to get the word out that we are being highly innovative and trying to find the next wave of opportunity. Not only are we accumulating USD 100 million of Trend Micro money, we are also accumulating the Trend Micro Know-How. In some cases, we will be taking the ownership position in a company and offering people to help them make sure that the security ends are getting built into the applications.

How do you plan to address the lacunae in terms of shortage of cyber security professionals globally? Any plans for India?

Kevin: There is a massive shortage of skills, cyber security professionals, as reported by Cisco Security Advisory Services that talked about the 1 million cyber security positions that are open across the globe today. We are leading the way in terms of coming up with bringing cyber security professionals into the market. We’ve created our first training center, it’s a cyber security training center in Cairo, Egypt and the campus that we have is able to train 25 to 50 cyber security professional every 7 weeks. And that is going to tune our growth in Middle East and Africa.

We are making a commitment of those 25 people, whom we will hire from among them. The rest of them won’t actually get hired by Trend Micro. They will end-up working for customers, channel partners and help them get the right solutions deployed. We graduated almost 100 people by Q4. Out of 100, we will hire up to 25.

We are planning to introduce in other countries as well like Brazil, Canada. Stay tuned for what we have planned for India. These are the innovative things that we are doing. There is a big challenge on finding talented cyber security professionals.

What are Trend Micro’s key focus areas specific to APAC markets and closer to India?

Kevin: I see a lot of similarities. In APAC, including India there are a lot of activities happening around Cloud right now and virtualization, which is a strong growth driver and continues to be a strong growth driver.

Across the globe, all three of our major solution areas that are growing are: Endpoint, Hybrid Cloud security and Network. Half of our business comes from endpoint and that is growing in mid-single digit. Our Hybrid Cloud security offering is growing at 45% plus which is a big business for us, forming a quarter of our business. The Network defense that forms quarter of our business is growing at 25%. We are seeing the same in APAC as well.

But definitely there is one thing that the team is really good at is in finding those next generation projects, whether it is a big change in cloud, virtualization and container related technologies. The APAC region tends to be lead adopters and that’s why Hybrid cloud security is a strong growth area in the entire region.

Can you share insights specific to India, on the evolving ecosystem?

Kevin: We are going to be on the lookout for innovation. India market in particular is very technology savvy. We are going to take big initiatives largely driven in India partnering with big system integrators (SI’s) who happen to be champions.

We can see that more in companies like AWS who started as technology-oriented offering. Their offerings are infrastructure service. Now they are starting to focus much more on the application itself. There is an entire team in AWS whose sole responsibility is migrating SAP from physical instances to the cloud, and we want to make sure that security is built-in when SAP application moves and migration happens from the physical environment to cloud environment. So, we are working with AWS team and system integrators who will help with migration. We are starting to see high emphasis on the applications that is put on the cloud, and the objective is not only from the business standpoint but also from the security standpoint. The system integrators of India are going to play a big role.

With high incidence of ransomware and targeted attacks being reported over the last few months, how did Trend Micro manage to provide solutions and address it? What are the measures that customers need to adopt?

Kevin: WannaCry was interesting. We are predicting that ransomware is not going to decline, it will continue to increase in 2018, as per our threat research team. They will be announcing in Q4 that ransomware will continue to rise. We were very fortunate with WannaCry, that we detected and blocked it with many of our products depending upon what was deployed, whether with our network, with our Tipping Point or with our host with Deep security or endpoint offerings.

But at the end of the day, a SOC (Security operations center) is increasingly coming into focus, and what customers are doing from an incident response standpoint. We are not a service based company, we don’t have any plans, nor do we think we should be in the services business. But, we do want to be a product company that is providing capabilities to customers so that they can do it themselves or bring it to the service providers to do it for them. SOC is going to come into play and that is going to be our focus area.

NIKE