Challenges

Cloudnexa’s customers often have limited IT budgets, so cloud services deployment and management costs are a concern. They also often lack the IT resources to address compliance and security, which is important for companies that operate in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare. Failure to meet regulations could result in large fines or security breaches. “It’s not enough to support and secure endpoints, you must secure entire environments. But finding a vendor that can secure the entire IT cloud environment with cloud-native services at an affordable price is a huge challenge,” says MJ DiBerardino, Cloudnexa CEO. “With many businesses growing rapidly, the ability to scale is key to enabling them to deliver on their promises. We have to pivot and adjust with our clients every day.”

Why Trend Micro

Cloudnexa has been an AWS partner since 2008, an AWS Premiere Consulting Partner since 2013, and a certified AWS Managed Services Provider since 2015. Since working with Trend Micro in 2014 to secure its AWS workloads, Cloudnexa’s partnership with Trend Micro as its preferred solution provider strengthened. “It’s about time-to-market, ease-of-use, and that Trend Micro offers a full, ready-to-go SaaS solution—those are all huge value-adds for us. And the pricing via the AWS Marketplace is always right. I haven’t seen another security vendor that can provide the same level of service at anywhere near the cost,” says DiBerardino.

Trend Micro’s constant evolution to address new security threats is another selling point. “Every day there are new AWS services available. Cloudnexa, Trend Micro, and AWS work together so whenever a new AWS service is released, Trend Micro already has it covered. That’s extremely important because when new services are offered, our clients want to use them,” says DiBerardino.

“Trend Micro is also willing to collaborate with us to meet our customers’ needs, including developing a usage-based licensing model. Trend Micro was open to the concept. A lot of other partners were unwilling to work with us on it. The fact that Trend Micro took our idea on showed that they are as forward-thinking and visionary as we are,” says DiBerardino.

Solutions

As an early adopter of Trend Micro Cloud One – Workload Security, Cloudnexa was originally attracted to Trend Micro Cloud One because of its pure security as a service (SaaS) capabilities. “It allowed us to bridge our knowledge gap and get to market quickly, which was very valuable,” says DiBerardino. 

While there are elements of security the customer is responsible for when they move to AWS as part of the shared responsibility model, DiBerardino finds that most Cloudnexa’s customers think that by simply moving to AWS they are inherently secure, he reminds clioents that it’s not a “set it and forget it” situation. “There are gaps that AWS cannot solve alone,” says DiBerardino. “In addition to offering Trend Micro Cloud One, we also use the solution for our own security. We do not recommend anything to our customers that we don’t use ourselves, so everything we have internally is protected by Trend Micro Cloud One”.

“In our line of work, automation is everything. We automatically deploy Trend Micro Cloud One across our customer base, eliminating the need to log into every instance and manage and deploy it every time we move a new system on or off. If a customer is doing autoscaling or containerization, automation is key,” continues DiBerardino.

Results

Working with Trend Micro has enabled Cloudnexa to further customize its services to include managed security. “It’s not just about having the right services in AWS. Taking that next step and creating a managed security offering built on Trend Micro Cloud One is helping us generate new opportunities. When we can show clients a one-stop-shop type of solution, it helps us win business,” says DiBerardino.

Moving its distribution of Trend Micro Cloud One to the AWS Marketplace has provided Cloudnexa and its customers with two major benefits. “Before we made the change, we had to manually manage and track over 200 licenses that had to be renewed every two years. Now, AWS does all the license management for us. This is a huge benefit and time saver for us,” says DiBerardino. “Procurement is super easy through the AWS Consulting Partner Private Offer program. Pushing Trend Micro Cloud One out to our client base is so simple. It cuts down the time of procurement and gets them to market faster. That’s extremely valuable to our midmarket customers. They just point and click in the AWS Marketplace and they’re off and running. You can’t get any simpler than that.” 

In addition to Trend Micro Cloud One’s ability to protect more threats faster, Cloudnexa has been able to provide their customers with greater value. “We see cost savings of 50 to 60 precent when we move customers from their existing security solution to Trend Micro Cloud One,” says DiBerardino.

"AWS and Trend Micro integration helps us focus on innovating. We have confidence that Trend Micro Cloud One is provisioned automatically with a trail for malware and vulnerability detection and integrity monitoring."

MJ DiBerardino - CEO, Cloudnexa

What's next?

Cloudnexa’s recent acquisition by NHN Global is driving new investment into the company, spurring plan by the company to use some of that capital to double down on compliance efforts. “A lot of companies need help bridging the compliance gap. Trend Micro Cloud One is key in helping us win those types of engagements,” concludes DiBerardino.