Uncover More Attacks Faster with the New Vision One Platform: A Trend Micro Partnership

One of our core tenants since launching MDR services at Critical Start has always been that we don’t build “threat detection” products. There are a massive number of security vendors in the marketplace, and we’ve always believed it would be foolish to think that we could out-innovate all of them to provide a more effective threat detection tool. Instead, we’ve focused on building the most effective Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services on top of best of breed products from every category. We, of course, have built all of these services on top of our home grown Zero Trust Analytics Platform™ (ZTAP®), which allows us to provide unparalleled visibility and alert resolution on these products.

As a result of this philosophy, we are always monitoring the market for excellence and innovation from security vendors that we can build services around. This is how in late 2021, during one of our regular market reviews, Trend Micro caught our eye. Trend Micro is no newcomer to the security space, with its roots as a security vendor going back to 1988 as a long time leader in the antivirus space. But what really impressed us was the innovation they continued to demonstrate, as well as how it was paying off in the market.

Earlier in 2021, Trend Micro launched their Vision One XDR platform to create a single console for their wide range of security offerings. In 2021, they were a top three Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, and one of only two Leaders in The Forrester New Wave: Extended Detection Response (XDR Providers). Then in 2022, they were one of only three Leaders in The Forrester Wave: Endpoint Detection and Response Providers, and one of the highest performers in The Forrester Wave: Cloud Workload Security.

Sharing headquarters in the greater Dallas area (Trend Micro’s Americas HQ is also in Dallas), we began meetings with their product, research and alliances team to evaluate if there was a mutual fit between Trend Micro Vision One and Critical Start’s MDR that could suit joint customers. The Vision One platform provided us a natural integration point with ZTAP to aggregate alerts from Trend Micro’s multiple products.

The power of ZTAP afforded us a unique opportunity with our Vision One integration. Due to Critical Start’s unparalleled capability to resolve events at scale, we are not just ingesting all Vision One Workbench Alerts, but we are doing a much deeper level of monitoring by ingesting Observed Attack Techniques (OATs) directly to uncover more attacks faster than relying on Workbenches alone. We already have over 99% event reduction with our early customers. OATs not identified by the Critical Start Trusted Behavior Registry™ require human interaction for full resolution and are escalated to the security operations center (SOC) where the efficiency of our security experts help customers make more accurate decisions.  

Most importantly, our MDR services deliver outcomes that customers can count on, such as:

• Optimizing security investments: Align cybersecurity spend to business outcomes using data that articulates the value of the MDR service and your security controls  
• Reducing risk exposure: Resolution of more than 99% of endpoint OATs escalating less than 0.01% to you 
• Decreasing complexity: Over 40% of our customers rely on us to bring together conceptual insights across multiple security tools
• Elite SOC capabilities: Gain security expertise to oversee your defenses without adding full-time staff and resources

Critical Start’s MDR for Trend Micro Vision One for Endpoint is now generally available. We look forward to onboarding additional customers together and continuing to build, iterate and innovate together as Trend Micro continues to advance their security products for their customers. We’d love to tell you more. Contact us today to speak to an expert about uncovering more attacks faster and reducing events.