Trend Micro has served its Canadian customers who require data to be resident in Canada through its Deep Security, which is available on-prem as well as in the cloud, but Trend is now pursuing a cloud-first global strategy, and the Canadian data centre is part of that.
Adam Boyle, VP of Hybrid Cloud Security for Trend Micro in Canada
Cybersecurity vendor Trend Micro has launched its Trend Micro Cloud One regional data center service in Canada. Hosted in the Amazon Web Services ([AWS] Canada Central Region, this represents the seventh region added since August of this year, as part of Trend’s global strategy. Previously, only the U.S. had a resident cloud available.
“As a global company, we have had a SaaS-based offering for many years,” said Adam Boyle, VP of Hybrid Cloud Security for Trend Micro in Canada. “We have Canadian customers and other global customers who were okay with using a SaaS which was based on US soil. However, this was because we also had our Trend Micro Deep Security Software, which filled the gap very well, and it handled the banks and insurance companies in Canada. For years, it has had two configurations – on-prem and SaaS. Customers had that deployment choice and we had done very well with on-prem software for customers who wanted their data in Canada as a result.”
Boyle said that the change in strategy this year was due to a global repositioning of Trend Micro’s strategy.
“We moved away from point products and towards platforms,” he stated. “Trend Micro Cloud One launched last year, and once that was out, customers wanted to go beyond protecting servers and protect a lot more in the cloud. The Canada region launch was part of a broader multi-region strategy around the public cloud in 2021. We are now in eight AWS regions. Before this year, it was just the U.S. But we launched our second region on August 16, and by October 18, seven new regions had been launched. Canada was part of this, the seventh new region to be added this year.”
While the move was done as part of this global strategy, Boyle said there were compelling Canadian-specific reasons to do it as well.
“We had a had a pipeline of new customers who had data sovereignty and compliance requirements because of individual corporate policy, not sectoral regulatory reasons,” Boyle noted. “This was also important because we are interested in expanding into the federal government. There is a long-term strategic opportunity there in moving into a SaaS-based cybersecurity platform.”
Boyle said that Trend Micro didn’t make this shift in focus to the cloud earlier because in their space, the increased demand for SaaS came this year.
“We now see an appetite for running servers and infrastructure for SaaS, but the market pull for that was in 2021 and not in 2017,” he indicated. “We responded to that. This is about new market expansion. The breadth of services we can offer on sovereign soil is huge. We have seven services with open source scanning for vulnerabilities, and we can also protect any workload in Azure and GCP.”
Having a presence in the cloud in Canada will also upgrade and reinvigorate their Deep Security market.
“We have a lot of Canadian customers who have been delighted with our on-prem offering for many years, and we have a large Deep Security software base,” Boyle said. “The cloud gives us an opportunity to provide more value by migrating on-prem Deep Security to cloud Deep Security. It is basically the same code, so it allows the customer to have parity functionality, and adds access to services that they can choose to use or not use as they choose. We also effectively turn Deep Security from a product into a broader platform offering with Cloud One.”
The cloud options also give customers a higher degree of efficiency.
“The cybersecurity industry has been failing customers with too many overlapping tools that adds to costs,” Boyle stated. “Customers today want fewer tools that do more and that drove our strategy to have the platform. We can update much faster on Cloud One. With software, any change required an update. Now we make many changes every day, and the customer doesn’t have to manage that.”
