OVERVIEW

This Asia-Pacific-based cooperative social enterprise has various divisions, including continuing education, a property management company, and a grocery store chain. The organization’s mission is to enhance the social good by supporting lowincome families. Its initiatives include bringing affordable daily necessities, food, and drinks closer to their customers, providing high-quality, affordable healthcare and eldercare services, and offering adult education and vocational skills.

The organization sought to consolidate all its divisions into one unified umbrella, and it needed a security solution that could protect the entire enterprise from end to end. Tasked with this immense transformation, the small security team turned to Trend Micro, knowing that it could meet this challenge with its comprehensive security platform and the best customer support in the security industry.

CHALLENGES

Until a few years ago, the organization’s divisions were standalone entities with their own boards of directors, CEOs, and IT departments. Leadership decided that it would be more efficient to integrate the organization digitally and manage IT centrally. The combined IT organization, which began with just a handful of staff, has now grown significantly, including developers and infrastructure personnel. However, the team that manages security across all the enterprises consisted of only a handful people. Coordinating security for many different organizations, each of which had its own security products and solutions, was a monumental task.

The cooperative’s security team lacked adequate IT headcount to meet these challenges on its own, according their Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The organization sought to enhance its security, antivirus, and dashboard capabilities.

“The very first function we needed to bring uniformly across the whole group was cybersecurity, because cybersecurity is one of the most difficult fields to hire people in, especially as a non-technical firm.”

WHY TREND

With the small cybersecurity team, the CTO decided to seek a strategic partnership rather than invest in a single technical solution, and to grow the organization’s security fabric one product at a time. The CTO bought in to the XDR vision that Trend Micro presented, and it was aligned with what he wanted to achieve.

Trend Micro was extremely responsive to the organization’s needs, tailoring delivery of the solutions so that the security team could gain more urgently needed capabilities sooner. The communication that Trend Micro began with their security team was a differentiating factor.

“The Trend Micro team set up regular meetings with product managers to listen to our challenges and needs. It’s important for vendors to listen to customers because it is real situations and not theoretical.”

SOLUTION

The CTO knew what they wanted, and Trend Micro listened and addressed those needs. Collaboration was key in developing a solution for the organization that met the needs of their security team. The organization’s journey began with Trend Micro™ Managed Extended Detection and Response (Managed XDR), which helped accelerate the partnership by supplementing the security team with trained personnel to handle tasks without hiring additional personnel.

Following a growing roadmap, the security team expanded to Trend Micro™ Deep Discovery™ Inspector, Trend Micro™ TippingPoint™, and eventually Trend Vision One™ with XDR capabilities, which included consolidated dashboards.

“Since Trend Vision One presents findings using a common framework for detection, we benefit from better communication and fewer problems.”

Another benefit is the scanning functionality of Trend Vision One.

“When there’s an incident in one business, IT needs to make sure that it isn’t impacting the others, and Trend Vision One helps our team monitor the entire environment.”

A third benefit is the ability to go beyond standard cybersecurity events to the larger ecosystem.

“Trend Micro provides visibility across all its solutions. This connected intelligence helps us refine its threat-detection capabilities, with fewer false positives. Sensors at multiple points provide a better perspective and validation to filter results, thereby delivering more accurate alerts, saving time, and reducing reliance on headcount.”

RESULTS

The comprehensive set of Trend solutions enables the organization to achieve high levels of security without adding headcount. For example, patching can be a challenge for a small team, and the shift to a work-from-home environment due to COVID has exacerbated the situation. Having products such as TippingPoint, with its virtual patching capabilities, helps alleviate the time pressure and makes life much easier for the team. And Trend Micro endpoint protection solutions detect malware threats targeting work-from-home staff.

“We’ve had cases where our Trend Micro solutions have detected ransomware incidents, and Trend Micro stopped them before they even took off.”

The CTO also says that the relationship built with Trend Micro has gained the organization’s trust in turning to the Trend Micro team with its evolving needs.

“You can tell that Trend Micro’s culture is very different from spreadsheet-driven companies. It is more about customers, and you can feel it in the interactions. It’s customer-centric.”