Trend Micro revamps endpoint offerings

The company on Monday released OfficeScan 10 and a new combined security and management offering known as the Endpoint Security Platform.

For OfficeScan, the update will be the first to utilize the company's Smart Protection Network. The cloud-based service allows the software to remain in communication with an update server to receive new data on threats.

This, said Trend Micro vice president of enterprise marketing and customer insight Dan Glessner, could solve what the company sees as a fundamental problem in the old system of daily signature updates which cannot keep up with the flood of new threats.

"We were seeing more than 1500 new pieces of malware per hour, and we think that is going to double in the coming years," Glessner told vnunet.com.

"There is a lot of pain enterprises, and there are tremendous cost and management challenges that our customers were experiencing."

In addition to adding support for the cloud service, the new offerings will allow administrators to set up local servers which can be used to push the security updates to machines within the local network. When outside of the network, systems will still connect to the cloud service to remain updated.

In addition to the OfficeScan update, Trend also said that it will be adding new management capabilities to its endpoint offerings.

The new Endpoint Security Platform integrates with systems management services from partner company BigFix.

Ron Clarkson, director of endpoint security at Trend Micro, told vnunet.com that the new service will not only simplify management, but also allow growing companies to save money.

"As a business's needs grow and change over time and they want to add something like patch management, they have to go with a separate vendor or a separate agent with a separate architecture and a separate team to manage it," explained Clarkson.

"With the Endpoint Security Platform, whenever you're ready to deploy that technology you just flip a switch, because the platform is already pervasive throughout your enterprise."