Originally announced July 2019. Source: finance.yahoo.com / Trend Micro press release.
Overview
Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704) announced the extension of its network protection capabilities to the cloud through Trend Micro Cloud Network Protection, made available on AWS Marketplace. The solution was designed specifically for AWS Transit Gateway and addresses a common enterprise pain point: the operational complexity of inserting and managing network security appliances inside cloud network topologies.
The Problem: Firewall-Based Approaches in the Cloud
Traditional firewall-based network security models were built for on-premises environments and carry significant operational baggage when lifted into the cloud. According to Trend Micro, customers consistently reported three major pain points:
- Operational complexity: Managing firewall rules and routing policies across multiple cloud accounts and VPCs is labor-intensive.
- Disruptive deployment: Inserting security appliances into existing network paths often requires rearchitecting workloads or changing IP address schemes.
- Inefficiency at scale: Stateful inspection appliances that work well on-premises can become throughput bottlenecks when cloud workloads scale dynamically.
How AWS Transit Gateway Enables the Solution
AWS Transit Gateway acts as a regional network hub, centralizing routing between Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and on-premises networks. Instead of managing complex VPC peering meshes, network teams attach VPCs and VPN connections to a single Transit Gateway, which then controls traffic routing across all connected spokes.
Trend Micro’s Cloud Network Protection plugs into this hub model to deliver transparent inline inspection—meaning traffic is inspected as it transits the gateway without requiring changes to application configurations, routing tables within individual VPCs, or IP addressing schemes. The approach avoids the application disruption that typically accompanies inserting a security appliance into an existing network path.
FPGA Acceleration for High-Throughput Workloads
For organizations with especially demanding network traffic volumes, Trend Micro made available deployment on Amazon EC2 F1 instances, which are equipped with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGA-accelerated instances can offload computationally intensive packet inspection tasks from general-purpose CPUs, enabling higher throughput at lower latency—relevant for financial services, media streaming, and other high-bandwidth workloads.
Key Capabilities of Cloud Network Protection
- Transparent inline deployment: No need to rearchitect existing VPC topologies or modify application network configurations.
- Scalable inspection: Designed to scale with cloud-native elasticity, avoiding the fixed-capacity limits of traditional appliances.
- Continuous visibility: Provides ongoing monitoring of east-west and north-south traffic flowing through Transit Gateway.
- Threat intelligence integration: Leverages Trend Micro Research, including the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) bug bounty program, to detect advanced threats, vulnerabilities, and exploits.
- Security tool integration: Designed to interoperate with existing security toolchains rather than replace them.
AWS Marketplace Availability
By listing on AWS Marketplace, Trend Micro made Cloud Network Protection discoverable and purchasable by AWS customers without requiring a separate procurement process. At the time of announcement, AWS Marketplace had approximately 230,000 active buyers, giving the solution immediate distribution reach.
“As companies move and scale their infrastructure in the cloud, they are looking for ways to easily insert and manage security appliances in their network topologies. With AWS Transit Gateway, Trend Micro’s security solution is now available to 230,000 buyers through AWS Marketplace and will help our shared customers address their network security needs in the cloud.”
— Dave Brown, Vice President, EC2 Compute & Networking Services, Amazon Web Services
“Trend Micro’s approach removes these operational challenges. With transparent deployment into the network fabric, it delivers scalable security and continuous visibility, while eliminating the need to rearchitect and avoiding application disruption.”
— Nilesh Jain, Vice President, Southeast Asia and India, Trend Micro
Customer Perspective: Copa Airlines
Copa Airlines was cited as an early customer for the solution. Alex Tarte, IT Security & Risk Manager and CISO at Copa Airlines, noted that the solution’s promise of frictionless security operations was particularly relevant for business applications that must meet the airline’s scale and performance requirements.
Why This Matters for DevOps and Cloud Network Teams
Cloud network security has historically lagged behind the pace at which DevOps teams provision infrastructure. Security appliances that require manual route table changes or static IP assignments become blockers in automated, infrastructure-as-code pipelines. A transparent inline model—where the security layer is inserted at the Transit Gateway level rather than inside individual VPC routing—aligns better with how modern cloud environments are built and operated:
- Network teams can enforce consistent inspection policies centrally, independent of individual workload owners.
- Application teams are not required to change deployment templates or Terraform/CloudFormation configurations to accommodate the security layer.
- Security posture scales automatically as new VPCs attach to the Transit Gateway, without manual intervention.
About Trend Micro
Trend Micro is a global cybersecurity vendor offering layered security for data centers, cloud environments, networks, and endpoints. The company operates in over 50 countries and runs the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), one of the largest independent bug bounty programs, which contributes threat intelligence to its product portfolio.