Trend Micro's chief technology strategy officer David Chow expects security vendor collaboration and consolidation to play a significant role in national security, he told SDxCentral in an interview at the RSA Conference.

"Us talking about vendor consolidation doesn't mean that we're buying other people out, but it's gonna happen," Chow said. Rather, he anticipates vendors will come together and be able to "play with each other with different data sets that they'll be able to adjust."

President Biden's executive order on zero trust, for example, outlines five distinct pillars of zero trust, each with its own subcomponents.

"I can honestly say — and you'll hear this from our competitors as well — there is no one solution in the industry that can actually solve all five pillars," Chow said.

This is where collaboration and consolidation come into play. Trend Micro has ways to supplement some areas, but Chow noted identity and access management, for example, as an area in which the vendor truly has no solution.

"That's where we need to rely on vendor integration with Okta and One Identity to be able to make sure that we're offering a comprehensive solution that can solve zero trust," he explained.

But across the cybersecurity ecosystem, many areas require a lot more collaboration than what currently exists.

"We have our set of threat intel, and we're very proud of our threat intelligence," but it still needs to combine that with "information collected by other entities to be able to provide the most comprehensive view," Chow explained.

"That's why I'm saying that I think all the vendors are going to come together and start formulating this — probably [through] some sort of federated approach — so that we're able to defend against cyberattacks" on organizational and national levels, he added.

Chow is also part of Trend Micro's U.S. Federal Business Unit, which provides zero-trust security during the digital transformations of national organizations like the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and several branches of the U.S. military.