Trend Micro today said it secures 2.5 trillion cloud events daily, which the cloud security giant says sets an industry record.

For comparison, CrowdStrike, which Trend Micro claims is its closest competitor in terms of events per day, processes about 1 trillion.

During an interview with SDxCentral on the sidelines of AWS re:Invent, Trend Micro COO Kevin Simzer also said his company protects 6 million workloads. For reference, Palo Alto Networks says it covers 2 million workloads.

“I love to talk about the workloads that we’re protecting,” Simzer said. “It depends on the report you read, but either the number one or number two barrier to adopting the cloud continues to be security. And what we’re trying to say is we have an answer to help check that off the list. You need not worry,” he added, noting that Trend Micro, a cloud security pioneer, was one of AWS’ earliest cybersecurity partners.

It also helped establish the AWS Marketplace, and that business is on the upswing, too. Trend Micro saw 63% growth in annual recurring revenue in the AWS Marketplace and 177% sales growth year-over-year in the second quarter of 2021.

Additionally, the vast majority of Trend Micro customers use AWS, Simzer said. “From a security standpoint, we have figured out the shared security responsibility model, and in partnering so deeply with AWS over the years, we think we’ve got the formula.”

So while Trend Micro isn’t as flashy and its executives aren’t as loquacious as some of its competitors, the cloud security giant decided to use AWS re:Invent as an opportunity to humblebrag about its new statistics. “We are using this as a way of showing people — and talking in terms of trillions of security events — how deployed our platform is for protecting workloads in the cloud and ultimately stopping bad guys,” Simzer said.

Trend Micro started working with AWS a decade ago and its executives attended the first annual AWS re:Invent in 2012.

“I can still remember going to that show, and people coming up to us saying, ‘Why are you here?’ We were the only cybersecurity company to show up,” Simzer said. “We felt like when there’s a big infrastructure change that’s going on — an infrastructure change like somebody’s moving an application from their physical data center to the public cloud — that’s an opportunity for incredible innovation. It’s also an opportunity for the bad guys.”

Trend Micro saw both of these opportunities early on, he said. This was before the rest of the industry started talking about digital transformations and securing organizations’ journey to the cloud. “So we started working with the innovator in the cloud, which was AWS, and it went from there,” he added.

Fast forward to 2021, and Trend Mirco’s security platform runs in eight AWS data centers around the globe. “We’re solving that data sovereignty issue for a number of our largest customers,” Simzer said.

This early-mover advantage worked out well for Trend Micro’s overall cloud business, too, which now accounts for 27.5% of the worldwide cloud workload security market, according to IDC. That’s more than three times that of the next security provider.

IDC reports the worldwide cloud workload security market hit $1.2 billion in 2020 with Trend Micro owning $340.1 million of that. Its closest competitor — McAfee, with $104.2 million in annual revenue — commands 8.4% of the market, followed by Broadcom ($100.3 million), Check Point ($92 million), Palo Alto Networks ($90 million), Cisco ($71.5 million), and Sysdig ($31.7 million). The remaining 32.8% of the market comes in at $405.6 million.

Customers chose Trend Micro for its platform approach to cloud security, Simzer said. Looking ahead to 2022, the vendor is focused on building out its application security controls, he added.

“You’ll see more from us in and around that area, trying to do our part to make sure that developers are adopting as much security as possible,” Simzer said. “We don’t want to slow them down, but we need to make sure that security is in place.”

As organizations continue moving their applications to the cloud and developing cloud-native applications, this is another area that’s ripe for innovation. Forrester projects the application security market will grow to $12.9 billion by 2025, which represents a compound annual growth rate of 17.3% from 2020.

“Nobody, ourselves included, has really solved the complete riddle for how we’re gonna keep this wonderful innovation train going and not slow down the application development but make sure these applications are built with security in mind,” Simzer said. “So there’s definitely some work we all have to be doing.”