Financial Strength Should be Key Consideration When Choosing the Cybersecurity Vendor in COVID-19 Era: Mahendra Negi

Financial stability directly leads to new product innovations; the company shifts gear to focus on hybrid cloud and SOC security

Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global leader in cybersecurity solutions, recently held its inaugural virtual regional partner conference, PartnerTRENDs 2020. The event was attended by channel partners across Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa, and featured Trend Micro global executives including its CEO, COO, and CFO, along with regional business leaders and partners.

The negative economic impact forced upon businesses by the COVID-19 pandemic has created confusion and led to concerns in the channel community when it comes to choosing the right cybersecurity vendors to work with. At the event, Mahendra Negi, CFO, Trend Micro, reassures the partners of the company’s financial stability, its strong net cash and profitability margin.

“There are many considerations partners should take into account when choosing the right cybersecurity vendor, especially during this outbreak. A company’s current financial strength is becoming a more important factor now, as venture capitalists are largely holding back investment during this period. This means vendors whose strategy is to spend two dollars in order to earn one dollar in return would not be receiving the two dollars in the first place. Partners need to be wary of companies that heavily rely on external investment to get the business going and don’t have a way to generate revenue on its own.”

Trend Micro currently holds 35% of the hybrid cloud security market share. The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) customer base surpassed the traditional on-premise customer base in 2019; and it is seeing tremendous growth of its SaaS offerings during this outbreak.

There are two trends the company observes and highlights during the event: the need to secure the hybrid cloud environment and the need to secure the security operations centers (SOC).

“Trend Micro has the most comprehensive cloud security offerings in the industry right now, addressing concerns arising from workloads, containers, serverless applications, network, to compliance in the cloud”, says Nilesh Jain, vice president, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro, referring to the company’s newly launched Cloud One platform.

“On top of that, as an organization’s IT environment gets larger and more complex, the race to detect threats becomes a more urgent task. Trend Micro’s cross detection and response (XDR) offering is designed to address daily issues experienced in the SOC environment, with the ultimate goal of shortening the detection window.”

Trend Micro’s XDR platform collects security data from the server, endpoint, network, and email into one data lake and analyzes all the data together, breaking the silos that traditionally existed between different security tools. The goal is to reduce the number of alerts SOC analysts receive on a daily basis, and provide rich, contextual information to help them prioritize the security events.

“Financial strength directly translates into investment in R&D and new products”, adds Negi.