Vodacom Taps Trend Micro to elevate cybersecurity offering

The cyber threat landscape continues to pose a serious risk to businesses as cybercriminals increase their use of sophisticated techniques to enhance their chances of success.

When combined with vulnerabilities from organisations shifting rapidly to digitalisation and remote working within the pandemic environment, cybersecurity failure is one of the top risks for businesses around the world in 2021, according to The World Economic Forum.

To ensure businesses are not on the backfoot when it comes to cyber-attacks, Vodacom Business has expanded its security solutions to offer Trend Micro Worry-Free Services. This suite of protection services not only encompasses multiple endpoints, such as laptops, desktops, mobile devices and servers, but includes web browsing, email and cloud collaboration.

“At Vodacom Business, we understand that organisations are facing enormous challenges in today’s business climate, including the proliferation of cyberattacks. As a leading technology provider, our aim is to offer solutions that help businesses digitalise effectively while overcoming the complexities of a remote, cloud-based environment. Through our partnership with Trend Micro, we are able to provide easy-to-install, simple-to-use security services that eliminate security gaps across any user activity from anywhere in any business,” says Kabelo Makwane, Managing Executive for Cloud, Hosting & Security at Vodacom Business.

“Implementing our Worry-Free services to its customer base will allow Vodacom to provide an array of managed security solutions and applications that protect mobile devices, laptops, workstations, as well as email and email-based applications,” says Juan Joubert, Cybersecurity Practice Lead at Trend Micro.

As the threat landscape is continuously changing at a fast pace, Trend Micro Worry-Free Services have been designed to constantly learn, adapt and share intelligence in real time. An all-in-one agent with an intuitive cloud-based console gives in-depth visibility, control and advanced protection across an entire organisation. As businesses continue to work remotely and implement cloud infrastructure, this dashboard is accessible through any web browser and able to manage multiple devices, with Windows, Mac, Android and iOS support.

“Our Worry-Free suite is a SaaS based solution, which means the maintenance thereof is very light ensuring that the speed of adopting new features and functions is a quick process. This is a huge advantage for Vodacom clients in today’s dynamic working environment,” says Joubert.

“For smaller businesses that lack a dedicated security team and skillset, this single agent can help to lessen the workload on IT services by offering up-to-the-second information across the whole organisation, including remote devices and email,” adds Makwane.

Advanced protection for every asset

Ransomware is one of the biggest threats to an enterprise. Using the latest technologies of machine learning and behavioural analytics combined with state-of-the-art detection techniques, Trend Micro Worry-Free Services protects against crypto, malware and advanced threats.

As human error is often to blame in an attack, businesses can use the URL filtering feature, which compares webpages against a database to prevent employees from accessing harmful sites, and application monitoring, which blocks unauthorised or unknown applications from executing attacks.

The leak of sensitive data is not only costly to a company, but it also has potential legal ramifications with the recent Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) coming into effect. Vodacom Business can assist in safeguarding data through integrated data loss prevention, encryption management, and device control capabilities of Trend Micro Worry-Free Services, which cover the broadest range of devices, applications and file types.

Meeting the needs of every business

Every business has different needs and concerns when it comes to choosing a security solution. For these reasons, Vodacom Business offers a suite of Trend Micro Worry-Free Services that range in cost-effective capabilities.

These include Advanced for complete email and collaboration protection, Worry Free XDR for automatic detection and response across email and endpoint, and Worry Free with Co-Managed XDR that mitigates threats for clients while alleviating overburdened managed service providers without significant investment.

“Protecting 250 million endpoints globally and with more than 30 years of industry experience, Trend Micro is a trusted and valuable partner to elevate our security offerings at Vodacom Business. Our clients have peace of mind that they have the latest technology solutions protecting their assets without disruption to connectivity and continuity. We are able to remove the complexity from cybersecurity so that businesses can focus on what matters most to them and, as a result, go further together,” concludes Makwane.