Trend Micro on Monday announced its zero-trust strategy, which will focus on a comprehensive understanding of a company’s risk profile.
Based on beta tests with 3,500 enterprises, Trend Micro designed the program to continually assess the risk of identities, devices and cloud applications using telemetry across endpoint, email, cloud infrastructure, networks and software as a service (SaaS) applications. Trend Micro will then use the risk insights to automatically detect, block or remediate issues before a connection gets completed.
When it comes to zero trust, vendors are challenged to help make zero-trust initiatives actionable for enterprises, said Frank Dickson, program vice president for security and trust at IDC. Dickson said Trend Micro’s initiative does just that, looking to make zero trust actionable.
“Examples include providing tools to illuminate identity risks such as compromised user accounts and suspicious user activity and device risks such as unpatched vulnerabilities,” Dickson explained. “As digital transformation increasingly drives us to IaaS [infrastructure as a software] and SaaS, actionable tools become even more important to implement zero-trust as the complexity of the security task grows exponentially with each new cloud environment and the size of security teams to address the new complexity remain constant.”
SaaS and cloud are a greater weight on corporate IT teams, which are already dealing with legacy security architectures that can no longer scale effectively,” said Greg Young, vice president of cybersecurity at Trend Micro.
“Attackers know this, so have exploited lateral movement and the disconnect between SaaS and cloud, especially relating to identities and vulnerabilities,” Young said. “Zero-trust means that even if SaaS or cloud is unsanctioned and connected to unmanaged endpoints, there has to be security that understands posture and verifies before trusting."
John Grady, a senior analyst who covers networking security at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said Trend Micro has brought together visibility into both threat and posture risks through its new risk-based offering.
“The aggregation of visibility across devices, identities, and applications is noteworthy as well because it supports not only access control decisions relative to zero trust, but investigative and response actions as well as CISO and SOC reporting,” Grady said. “Cloud Access Security Brokers have provided some of these capabilities in the past, but Trend Micro now centralizes risk visibility across IaaS, sanctioned, and unsanctioned SaaS applications, and managed and unmanaged devices.”
