Cyber Crime
Making a difference, one customer at a time
It took humankind roughly 100 generations to get from the advent of paper to the invention of the computer, but just one to get from the world wide web to ChatGPT. It’s clear that we are living in a period of exponential technological change. And Trend Micro has been around for most of it. In fact, we’re not just here passively watching things happen. We anticipate and respond to these changes, work out where the weaknesses in technology are and then proactively design ways to reduce cyber risk.
The daily challenges and opportunities this throws my way has kept me here for 13 years—just a fraction of the 100 successive quarters of growth our company is celebrating. Hopefully there will be many more to come.
Moving in time with the market
My time at Trend provides a perfect picture of how the company stays current amid so much change and disruption. Over a period of more than a decade, our solutions have embraced all stages of the customer hybrid datacentre journey—from physical to virtual to cloud, and back again. Why back again? Because some customers are realising that public cloud is not right for all use cases, and for cost, security, compliance, or other reasons they’re investing more in on-premises IT. That’s why Trend will always offer a hybrid model—it’s not just about delivering our products via SaaS and securing only cloud environments. As long as customers need to also mitigate risk across their on-premises and legacy systems, we will deliver for them.
Yet an increasing differentiator and undoubtedly the direction of travel for us today is towards a single integrated platform approach. It’s something that speaks to all our customers—helping them to manage costs and stretched security teams more effectively and manage risk more efficiently across the full extent of their attack surface.
What else has changed? A key cornerstone of our strategy is now delivering customer success through all stages of our relationship—from pre-sales to purchase, deployment, onboarding and post-sales support. Increasingly this also means cybersecurity services including managed detection and response (MDR), incident response, and red and purple teaming. This simply didn’t exist when I joined the company, and until recently Trend relied on trusted partners to deliver services. But times change, and so must we.
One thing that hasn’t changed
Yet against this backdrop of continuous transformation, one thing has thankfully remained relatively unchanged during my tenure: the culture. Joining Trend Micro over a decade ago was like a breath of fresh air. I immediately knew I’d made the right decision and joined an organisation with a welcoming, unique and open culture.
It’s almost impossible to define what separates great culture from the rest. But one thing is certainly true: culture must be cultivated. Having such a strong group of female leaders at Trend – from our co-founder and CEO Eva Chen to my inspirational colleagues in Ireland, the UK and further afield – was, and remains, key to this. And despite the many changes in the company and the world around us during the past 13 years, that culture and many of those people remain, as do I.
I’ve also Trend to thank for the proudest and most memorable moment of my career: helping a long-standing customer – one of Ireland’s largest and busiest hospitals – from being impacted by a critical ransomware attack against the Irish Health Service Executive in 2021. Keeping that hospital afloat when so many others went under, and supporting its staff during a hugely challenging period, brought home the reason why I’m still here. And it reminded me that it is possible to make a difference.
