RACONTEURPH

Trend Micro boosts presence, stages security summit in PH

Trend Micro Incorporated is beefing up its presence in the Philippines in the corporate and consumer segments. It also continues its important role as a source of employment in the country.

Ian Felipe, Philippine country manager of Trend Micro, said he is bullish on the performance of the company because of the warm response of the market as manifested by the five-fold rise of its sales force over the past five years.

“This is an indicator on how we plan to continuously expand and develop the local market and help organizations in the cybersecurity front,” Felipe said.

“At the same time, Trend Micro is continuously investing in talent. We have boosted our recruitment efforts, and this has grown more than 40% over the five-year period.”

Moreover, the company reported substantial growth in sales in the Asia Pacific region covering Australia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia driven by the huge demand in network security related business including cloud-related business.

Net sales for this period in Asia Pacific region amounted to 10,899 million yen (26.7% increase from the same period in the previous year) which is the highest net sales growth.

Despite the introduction of policies and regulations data breaches have remained consistent

The Philippine office of Trend Micro functions as the global technical support and research and development headquarters of the parent company, with focus on threat and incident response and solutions delivery. Aside from being one of the major threat research facilities all over the world, the Philippine office serves as the backbone of the company’s service infrastructure. “It is focused on providing a deep understanding of how threats and cyber attacks work in order to provide timely and appropriate solutions that the customers need,” he said.

This deep understanding allows Trend Micro researchers and engineers to gain insight on current security conversations not just in the country, but also globally. According to Felipe, information and data privacy is among these conversations. Despite the introduction of policies and regulations that aim to protect user data and privacy such as the Data Privacy Act, reports noted that data breaches have remained consistent, if not higher. In the Philippines, according to the National Privacy Commission, they've received 57 reported data breaches to NPC from January to May 2018.

“In our recently released 2018 Midyear Security Roundup report, we noted that using the relevant 2017 and 2018 datasets from Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, we saw a 16-percent increase in reported U.S.-based data breaches. This may indicate that even if enterprises are aware of the risks of data breaches, they may still be unable to enforce proper data protection mechanisms in a comprehensive manner,” Felipe said.

Meanwhile, Felipe said Trend Micro is organizing for the second time its Security TRENDs conference which will feature keynote and track sessions that discuss current challenges organizations are facing in the area of cybersecurity, such as the increasingly complex data breaches, new government policies, and the widening cybersecurity skills gap. With its theme this year focusing on Data Breaches, Security TRENDs will also feature some of Trend Micro solutions and technologies that are part of the company’s Connected Threat Defense strategy.

He said Security TRENDs provide an avenue for enterprises and organizations to address collectively these issues so that they can implement strategies, and solutions that are strong enough to withstand the rapid-changing landscape of the hyper-connected world.