Trend Micro Targets Virtualization, Cloud Security

Trend Micro continued its push around virtualization and cloud security Aug. 31 with two new product releases.

Part one of the announcement – which was made in conjunction with the VMworld 2010 conference running this week in San Francisco – is Trend Micro Deep Security 7.5, which leverages the latest VMware vShield Endpoint API and now includes an agent-less anti-malware module.

By integrating the vShield APIs, Trend Micro is able to provide completely agent-less security for VMs (virtual machines), Harish Agastya, director of data center security marketing at Trend Micro told eWEEK.

“No need to put an agent on any of those VMs, so no need to configure it, reconfigure it, patch it…we’ve taken all of that headache away from the administrator,” he explained.

The new module adds to the product’s existing toolkit of protections, which includes among other things deep packet inspection, integrity monitoring and intrusion detection and prevention.

In addition to Deep Security, Trend Micro also announced a beta release of SecureCloud, a hosted key management and data encryption service designed to give enterprises more control over data stored in public, private or hybrid clouds.

“The challenge that we are addressing is one of control,” said Todd Thieman, senior director of datacenter security marketing at Trend Micro. “If you look at what the cloud does in terms of controlling data, it poses some new challenges.”

The technology will facilitate the movement between the datacenter and the cloud, he added. With SecureCloud, enterprises can decide when and where keys are released and secure volumes are accessed as well as establish accountability over data access and key deployment with logging and audit functionality.

“The cloud’s been the sexy topic du jour; a lot of people are talking about how they want to use it and that security is a significant inhibitor,” Thieman said. “While there’s a lot of talk…we’re delivering substance so enterprises can go out there and take advantage of the cloud economics and the flexibility that the cloud has to offer.”

Delivered via software as a service, SecureCloud supports Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus or VMware vCloud. The product is expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2010. Organizations interested in the beta can apply here.