Trend Micro Partners with AWS Built-in to Simplify and Accelerate Complex Deployments

When Trend Micro became aware of the challenges customers face when deploying their Cloud One security platform on the AWS Cloud, including a lack of AWS expertise and time to perform complex deployments, they worked with the AWS Built-in team to co-build a solution to address customer pain points. The result is a fully integrated, ready-to-deploy bundle that includes Cloud One with AWS Systems Manager Distributor, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Security Hub. As a result, Trend Micro’s customers are experiencing a significant decrease in deployment time. For Trend Micro’s larger customers, these improvements can translate into cost savings reaching thousands of dollars.

It’s a typical scenario. Customers are ready to migrate to a secure cloud environment, but they don’t have cloud experts on site, and time and budgets are limited. They engage with an AWS Partner who specializes in cloud security, and that partner recommends a set of AWS foundational services that integrate well with their security product. It’s a great starting point, but frustration soon sets in when customers learn about the enormous investment required to learn about, configure, and deploy all the technologies involved. Complex deployments can literally take weeks for larger companies with multiple AWS accounts who don’t have AWS experts on site.

As a global leader in corporate server and cloud security, AWS Partner Trend Micro is all too familiar with these customer pain points. Fernando Cardoso, director of solution architects for AWS alliances at Trend Micro, says that customers can face a number of obstacles in their migration journey. First, they don’t typically have expertise in AWS foundational services such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Control Tower nor the time and resources required to learn them at a deep level. Second, they aren’t prepared to spend the time required to manually deploy these AWS foundational services in multiple accounts. Some larger customers can have hundreds of AWS accounts, which can translate into an enormous time commitment.

When Fernando first learned about the AWS Built-in Competency, he saw it as an opportunity to tackle some of the cloud migration issues facing Trend Micro’s customers. AWS Built-in is an AWS Specialization designed for partners who want to offer customers a solution that integrates partner products with AWS foundational services in a single, deployable package. The goal is to help customers experience a much simpler, faster, and automated deployment, reducing potentially weeks of work into minutes. For customers ready to migrate to AWS, an AWS Built-in solution could translate into significant cost savings. And for Trend Micro, an AWS Built-in solution could provide field engineers a proven way to accelerate customer adoption of Cloud One on AWS.

When Fernando engaged with the AWS Built-in team, he knew he needed to work backwards from the customer. He closely analyzed customer feedback gathered from his field engineers so he could design and build a solution that would directly address the findings uncovered in that feedback. He also knew the solution must give customers options to choose which AWS services and integrations are best suited for their architecture. This flexible design lets customers enable only the services they need, reducing time and complexity.

According to Fernando, “After learning which AWS services were supported by the AWS Built-in Competency, we matched them to our Cloud One product and then started building from there. We were heavily focused on customer usage data to form the goals of our design, and we also engaged with some of our existing customers to gather feedback throughout the process.”

After weeks of coding and testing against AWS best practices and the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Trend Micro officially launched their AWS Built-in solution and is currently onboarding several customers from various industries. 

The solution deploys Cloud One combined with a full integration of Trend Micro’s XDR (extended detection and response) solution, a data collection tool for detecting threats for faster response time. An additional layer of security is deployed on top of CloudTrail logs to give customers greater insight into suspicious activity throughout their workloads.

AWS Systems Manager Distributor deploys the Cloud One Workload Security agent every time a new instance is created on AWS accounts to help organizations enforce Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) on each workload. Cloud One - Container Security detects security issues using its runtime protection for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Kubernetes clusters and sends those findings directly to Security Hub. Security Hub aggregates, organizes, prioritizes, and automates remediation of security findings, giving customers visibility of their security posture across all AWS accounts from a single location.

One of Trend Micro’s largest customers is currently using the Cloud One AWS Built-in solution to perform threat modeling across their entire organization using CloudTrail combined with Trend Micro’s CloudTrail integration feature. They deployed the solution as a single package to all 500 AWS accounts in just few days. Previous manual deployments using standard AWS CloudFormation templates would have taken weeks or even months. Faster implementation times translated into massive cost savings for the organization.

AWS Built-in gives larger organizations the ability to mass-deploy across multiple accounts on a much wider scale in a shorter period of time. According to Fernando, “Mass deployments is a big reason why the AWS Built-in solution is so attractive to larger companies like healthcare organizations, financial services, and manufacturing customers. But it’s also equally attractive to our SMB customers, because every customer, regardless of size, wants to save time and money.”

Another AWS Built-in customer success story involves a partnership between Trend Micro and a well-known multi-cloud solutions provider. A mutual customer was ready to move forward with their migration to AWS with Trend Micro’s Cloud One security integration, but they had no idea how to get started. They didn’t have AWS expertise in house, and they lacked the time and resources to do research and learn about which AWS services would satisfy their cloud requirements. Fernando and his team analyzed their infrastructure and configured the entire migration and security framework in just a few hours, a significant increase for similar migrations that weren’t based on the AWS Built-in solution.

“This tri-party initiative combines AWS foundational services, Trend Micro’s AWS Built-in solution, and our partner’s professional consulting services to accelerate and deliver a fully integrated and secure cloud environment for our mutual customer,” said Fernando. From the start, customers are provided with a ready-to-deploy solution complete with AWS services and security integrations, and they receive the assistance they need with implementation and configuration. The goal is to give customers a fast path to their cloud migration with as little effort and frustration as possible. “It was peace of mind for the customer knowing they were completely set up with AWS foundational services topped with the added security protection offered with Cloud One. Our solution allows customers to think beyond that initial hurdle of opening their first AWS account and deploying their first workload.”

Trend Micro can serve as an example of how other AWS partner organizations can benefit from the AWS Built-in program. For solution architects, accelerated customer adoption is a major benefit. Combining Cloud One with AWS services into a single package that can be mass-deployed helps Trend Micro’s solutions architects assist customers migrate faster and more efficiently. According to Fernando, “This opens their time to tackle other customer requirements and nice-to-have requests that otherwise might have to take a back seat to getting their solutions deployed and running.”

The AWS Built-in solution is also a key differentiator for Trend Micro’s sales team when it comes to winning business. “Our customers have told us over and over again that they just need to get up and running and don’t have time to learn all the ins and outs of AWS and do all the manual deployments.” AWS Built-in is a direct response to those customer pain points. It provides a simplified and faster way to deploy Trend Micro on AWS, and it doesn’t require a wealth of knowledge about any of the technologies involved.

AWS Built-in is designed to be the “easy button” that partners can provide customers embarking on their migration journey to the cloud. It moves projects faster by reducing the need for major time commitments, costs, and deep learning. As Trend Micro exemplifies, AWS Built-in a direct response to customer demands for simpler deployments to AWS. Customers don’t have time and money to deal with all the complications that typically arise from multi-product integrations. AWS Built-in lets them bypass that complexity so they can spend time doing what they do best—providing value to their customers and running their businesses.