Trend Micro today unveiled its unified cybersecurity platform that integrates all of the vendor’s native services and builds an ecosystem with third-party partners and competitors such as Google Cloud, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and others.

The company pre-integrated all of its software components including cloud, endpoint, email, and network protection software into its Trend Micro One platform to pull together data, telemetry, and detection information into a common data lake, and conduct big data analytics for detection and response, explained Wendy Moore, VP of product marketing at Trend Micro.

As every organization’s attack surface grows due to digital transformation, Trend Micro's platform aims to discover, analyze, and mitigate those risks associated with users’ attack surfaces. This attack surface risk management lifecycle is Trend Micro’s “main source of differentiation” from other security vendors who are also building ecosystems through integration and partnership, Moore said.

“We've up-leveled it from being just about protecting to actually understanding your risk posture and prioritizing what is the most important thing to impact first,” she added. “We are definitely a leader when it comes to transforming this from being just about stopping threats to actually helping you manage your risk.”

Moore claims this unified security platform addresses the talent shortage, skill gap, alert fatigue, and lack of resources challenging the industry today.

“We continuously hear from customers that their security operations teams, they don't have enough people … and they've got so many different security tools that they're doing swivel chair management,” she said.

The core benefit of an integrated platform “comes down to time,” Frank Dickson, program VP of security and trust at IDC, told SDxCentral. “The ROI for security tools is increasingly being measured in a security professional's time.”

“Security professionals are our scarcest resources,” he added. “Reducing effort to integrate, manage, and leverage tools enables that precious resource to address more alerts, be more strategic, and solve more problems.” 

Dickson also pointed out that integration in the form of adding features to existing tools or connecting native services in a “plug-n-play” fashion is one of the key trends of the decade. “Integrate or perish is the battle cry of the day,” he argues. “Those security vendors that choose to not integrate will either be acquired or go out of business.”

On top of integrating its native services, Trend Micro One is designed to be an open platform that works with “all of these amazing tools that our customers have in their environment,” Moore said.

“We're giving them one place to do their detection, response, and investigation” with simple to use dashboards for risk situation communication, she added. 

The inaugural partners of Trend Micro's technology ecosystem include Bit Discovery, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Slack. Qualys, Rapid7, Splunk, and Tenable.

To build an ecosystem, the guiding light is to best protect our customers, “as opposed to making decisions on — I don't want to partner with them because we face them in the market and we compete,” Moore said. “Our competition we see is the hackers and the bad guys out there.”

“When a customer sees the value that comes from the attack surface risk management lifecycle, they're going to see why our approach is the best approach. And so we feel confident about winning customers over with this,” she added.

Several other security vendors including CrowdStrike and Mandiant have also pushed a collaborative approach in cybersecurity. 

The current trend seems to be integrating native offerings, or tools of other vendors which do not offer products that are directly competitive, Dickson noted.

“Best-of-breed type vendors such as CrowdStrike, Proofpoint, Zscaler, Netskope, Okta, and Splunk tend to have the greatest number of third-party integrations,” he added. “Security vendors with a more broad portfolio tend to place the emphasis on integrating their own offerings.”

Dickson reiterated that ecosystem partnerships provide time-to-value advantages for end customers and create a shared fate advantage for all the participants. 

“What is going to protect our customers best is by being open to all the possible data sources in their environment,” Moore concluded.