RF    Rik Ferguson

RF: Trend Micro’s been in business for over 20 years now with continuous focus on security, we’ve never diversified beyond our core competence of keeping companies and individuals safe.  We, as a company, have a history of constant innovation, and of constantly looking ahead, both in terms of developing technology, and anticipating the coming threat.

At the beginning of the 21st Century, the motivation behind malware changed completely from being one of causing as much damage as possible and spreading as widely as possible as quickly as possible, into one of making money from malicious software.  It moved into cyber crime.  That shift into a business model, really changed the way in which malware has been created, the way it’s distributed and the ways it’s developed.  What that means is the traditional means of detecting and defending against malicious software is no longer up to the job.

We, as an industry, have to change the way that we do things, and I’m pleased to say that Trend Micro are very much leading the way, and having our strategy validated by our major competitors.  What we’ve done is we’ve created the Smart Protection Network.  The Smart Protection Network takes a different look at the threat.  We’re looking at how are these malicious binaries distributed, where do they come from, how are people getting infected, and seeing if we can stop the threat even earlier on, break the chain of infection as early as possible.

If you’re using the traditional approach to detecting malware, pattern based, signature based detection, then you’re getting baseline protection at best and it’s absolutely true to say that 20th Century technology is not going to fix a 21st Century problem.

We’re making life easier for enterprise on a number of levels.  Smart Protection Network is obviously one of the most important of those.  We are removing the administrative overhead of having to look after keeping your pattern files up to date on every single end point, which takes up a lot of time and can cause a lot of problems.  We already have virtualised all of our appliance based solutions, and that’s where there is a bare metal installation, or you can run it within Hyper-V, or a VMware environment.  That allows people to maximise their investment in hardware.

Trend Micro have absolutely demonstrated their credentials for nomination, and for winning the award, because what we’ve done with the creation of the Smart Protection Network, is we have completely turned around the way that malware detection is done.  We were the first people to do that and, one of the most gratifying things for us as a company, is to see that our competition is validating our strategy.  We’ve seen announcements from McAfee that they need to move away from signature based detection.  We saw an announcement just today from Symantec that they’re going to be building in reputation based technology into their consumer, and eventually their enterprise products.  Trend Micro have already done that.  We’ve made the hardware investment to build the data centres out, we’ve made the technological, and research and development investment to build the technology.  We already have products out there, and we’re always there for you and we’re always looking ahead.