Trend Micro Tightens Container Security Integration in Cloud Platform
Trend Micro today extended its Trend Micro Cloud One platform to more tightly integrate its container security offering.
Mike Milner, vice president of cloud technology for Trend Micro, said the latest edition of Trend Micro Cloud One eliminates the need to separately deploy a container security platform. Instead, the company’s container security capabilities are now deployed as part of the larger Trend Micro Cloud One platform—making container security administration simpler at a time when the number of container applications running in production environments that need to be secured continues to steadily increase.
In addition, Trend Micro has simplified the deployment and management of its cloud intrusion prevention system.
In general, Trend Micro is moving to streamline the deployment of a wider range of cloud security services as part of an overall effort to make it simpler to consume them, said Milner.
The shift to the cloud has made it easier for more organizations to invoke a wider range of security capabilities. In on-premises environments, most organizations deploy firewalls and endpoint security, but little else; they lacked the ability to manage much else. Organizations continue to be even more short-handed as more workloads are deployed in the cloud. A cloud cybersecurity service eliminates the need for organizations to manage the deployment of the underlying platforms, many of which are now features of a larger service that makes them more accessible to a wider range of organizations.
Trend Micro is making it simpler to deploy container security as an integrated extension of Trend Micro Cloud One. That’s critical because while application development teams are exercising more influence over cybersecurity, responsibility for managing it still primarily lies with cybersecurity teams. Those teams need to secure both existing monolithic applications and emerging microservices-based applications built using containers, says Milner. Application development teams, however, do exercise veto power over any security platform that they feel slows down the rate at which applications are being built and deployed, he adds.
The challenge is that cloud applications deployed by developers are prone to misconfigurations. Those misconfigurations can be easily exploited by cybercriminals using scanning tools that make discovery of vulnerabilities relatively trivial. While the underlying cloud platforms tend to be more secure than on-premises environments, the processes used to build and deploy those applications are often deeply flawed.
The Trend Micro Cloud One service is also already available on the three major cloud platforms as part of an effort to make it simpler for organizations to secure multi-cloud computing environments. The company holds a 17.7% share of the cloud workload security market, which is nearly three times the size of its next largest competitor, according to the market research firm International Data Corp (IDC).
It’s still relatively early days as far as the adoption of cloud security platforms is concerned. As they continue to evolve, it’s become increasingly apparent that some level of container security will be built in. The issue now is determining which of those platforms disrupts the application development process the least without compromising security.
