In today’s fast-changing cybersecurity landscape, organisations are facing more complex threats, especially with the rise of AI-driven attacks and cloud adoption. In this exclusive interview with APAC Media and CXO Media, Sharda Tickoo, Country Manager for India & SAARC at Trend Micro, shares how the global cybersecurity company is using AI, advanced threat detection, and strategic partnerships to protect businesses.
How is the nature of conversations with CISOs changing in recent times? What are the major trends in these new conversations?
Conversations with CISOs are evolving from threat defense to risk-focused decision-making. There’s a strong emphasis on cyber risk exposure management (CREM) that is, quantifying, prioritizing, and communicating cyber risks in terms the board can understand. Cyber Risk Quantification is emerging as a critical capability within this approach, enabling security leaders to express risk in financial terms that resonate with executive stakeholders. By translating technical metrics into business language, Cyber Risk Quantification bridges the gap between security operations and strategic priorities.
Additionally, we are seeing CISOs move from reactive postures to proactive, AI-powered strategies. In the era of generative AI, the attack surface is rapidly expanding, and CREM provides the visibility and intelligence needed to act decisively. Today’s CISO is no longer a backend stakeholder; they are a key figure in shaping resilient digital transformation at the boardroom level.
What are the latest offerings that Trend Micro has added to its portfolio in recent times? Which solutions do you see gaining the strongest traction, and why?
We have recently introduced Trend Cybertron, a specialized cybersecurity large language model (LLM) purpose-built to anticipate and prevent threats across the modern digital estate. It leverages predictive analytics and real-time global threat intelligence to enhance cyber risk management, from attack path prediction to assisting SOC analysts through Trend Companion, our AI-powered virtual analyst. As enterprises adopt AI at scale, securing the AI ecosystem becomes critical, from infrastructure and cloud to data, users, and models.
At the forefront of our portfolio is Trend Vision One, our flagship cybersecurity platform, which continues to gain strong market momentum. It delivers integrated Cyber Risk Exposure Management (CREM), advanced XDR, and multilayered protection across endpoints, cloud, and hybrid environments. By leveraging AI to strengthen the overall security posture, it empowers organizations to proactively predict attack paths and accelerate responses.
How is Trend Micro differentiating itself in an increasingly competitive cybersecurity market?
Trend Micro stands apart through a unique combination of AI-driven threat intelligence, global reach, and end-to-end visibility across IT, OT, and cloud environments. Our platform, Trend Vision One, and the newly launched Trend Cybertron deliver unified risk, detection, and response capabilities, addressing today’s fragmented cybersecurity landscape with a cohesive, intelligence-led approach.
What is the proportional ratio between Trend Micro’s B2B and B2C businesses? What are Trend Micro’s key growth markets or verticals?
Trend Micro’s India business is predominantly B2B, with the enterprise segment driving the majority of our growth. While our consumer solutions remain robust, particularly in digital protection and privacy, our enterprise offerings, led by Trend Vision One, are scaling rapidly across cloud, hybrid, and OT environments.
Key verticals include BFSI, government, and defense, where security stakes are highest and digital transformation is accelerating. These sectors value our ability to deliver end-to-end protection, manage risk in real time, and support compliance in complex environments.
What are the core pillars of your current GTM strategy, and which emerging initiatives are you prioritizing? What role do strategic partnerships (e.g., cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft) play in Trend Micro’s go-to-market strategy?
Our go-to-market strategy is built on platform consolidation, proactive threat prevention, and partner-led scalability. We’re focused on delivering meaningful security outcomes, not just point solutions, through deep collaboration across the ecosystem.
Strategic partnerships are core to our execution. We collaborate closely with technology leaders like NVIDIA, with whom we’ve adopted the Agentic AI Safety Blueprint to secure the next generation of AI-driven workloads. By combining our cybersecurity expertise with NVIDIA’s AI and AWS’s cloud infrastructure, we help enterprises protect the full AI lifecycle, from model training to deployment, without compromising agility or performance. In today’s evolving threat landscape, security must be integrated, intelligent, and aligned with business outcomes.
Could you outline Trend Micro’s partner ecosystem—from global system integrators to MSSPs and regional resellers—and explain how responsibilities and support differ across channel tiers?
All our India business and a significant global portion is delivered through our diverse partner ecosystem. This includes resellers, distributors, MSSPs, GSIs, and cloud service providers. Our partner program is designed to support co-selling, service delivery, and customer success, with a clear tiering structure based on specialization and engagement. We empower partners with training, co-branded assets, and AI-driven insights, enabling them to deliver tailored cybersecurity across IT, OT, and cloud environments. From SMEs to large enterprises, our partners help scale secure digital transformation. We aim to create shared value, driving mutual growth while delivering resilient outcomes for customers.
How is Trend Micro integrating emerging technologies like AI and machine learning into its product suite?
We’re embedding AI at the core of our strategy. Trend Cybertron is a breakthrough innovation, an AI-powered cybersecurity agent built on a specialized LLM designed to detect and prevent threats before they materialize. It combines predictive analytics, automation, and 35 years of threat intelligence to help customers stay ahead of increasingly complex threats. AI isn’t just an add-on for us; it’s foundational. Our solutions use AI to reduce alert fatigue, prioritize vulnerabilities, and automate threat response. This not only improves speed and accuracy but also allows security teams to focus on high-value activities rather than being overwhelmed by noise.
How is Trend Micro evolving its cybersecurity strategy to address the growing threat landscape, especially with the rise of AI-driven attacks? With the shift to cloud and hybrid environments, how has Trend Micro adapted its offerings to secure modern workloads?
The threat landscape has grown in complexity with AI-driven attacks, cloud-native threats, and expanding digital surfaces. Trend Micro is responding with proactive, AI-powered defense mechanisms built into Trend Vision One and our latest innovation, Trend Cybertron.
We have also adapted our offerings to secure modern workloads across cloud, hybrid, and containerized environments, providing full-stack visibility and control.
As organizations scale AI initiatives, we’re focusing on securing the entire AI lifecycle: model training, deployment, and operation by leveraging strategic collaborations and real-time threat intelligence to protect against emerging risks.
What are the company’s priorities around XDR (Extended Detection and Response), and how do you see it evolving?
We see XDR not merely as an evolution of EDR but as the foundation for unified, risk-informed security correlating telemetry across endpoints, servers, cloud, email, and networks to deliver high-fidelity, actionable insights. In an era of increasingly evasive threats, siloed detection is no longer sufficient. Our approach to XDR is AI-driven and risk-centric, designed to surface what truly matters, reduce dwell time, and accelerate response through intelligent automation.
As part of this journey, we are helping customers establish a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework, an evolving discipline that enables organizations to continuously identify, assess, and prioritize exposures based on business risk. CTEM complements XDR by extending visibility beyond detections to include misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and potential attack paths, thus supporting more informed, proactive security decisions.
The next phase of XDR evolution lies in deeper integration with identity, threat intelligence, and operational risk frameworks to enable connected, adaptive defenses. With Trend Vision One, we are helping organizations move beyond alerts toward proactive, context-rich security operations that strengthen business resilience at scale.
