Palma On The Record

Whenever Bryan Palma has a conversation these days with a CIO or CISO about security operations — the day-to-day work of monitoring and responding to security alerts — he hears the same thing. Everyone reports that “they have a lot of pain around security operations,” Palma said, both from outdated tooling and the massive shortage of cybersecurity talent. Palma’s company, Trellix, is among those that believes the answer is extended detection and response (XDR) — a more modern approach to security operations that aims to offer enhanced correlation of data across tooling and ultimately, better prioritization of threats.

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More and more customers today recognize that while their security information and event management (SIEM) system may have been fine years ago, it’s no longer sufficient, Palma said. Looking ahead, “I think there’s going to be a big replacement of SIEM and an upgrade to much more modern technology — next-gen SecOps or XDR,” he said.

Palma, formerly a Cisco Systems veteran, has been the CEO of Trellix since it was formed in early 2022. Following the merger of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye in 2021, the combined company was split into two parts, with the endpoint security and XDR business becoming Trellix (and the remaining security service edge business becoming Skyhigh Security).

In a recent interview with CRN, Palma contended that while XDR may be the best answer right now to the security operations crisis, not all XDR is created equal. The Trellix XDR platform stands out by bringing together proven endpoint security technology (both endpoint protection and endpoint detection and response technologies) with security operations and analytics (from the FireEye Helix platform) and data protection technologies, according to Palma. That’s a combination that makes the Trellix XDR platform “the most comprehensive in the market,” he said. “We don’t see anybody else that has those three [capabilities in XDR].”

Palma also discussed the recently launched Trellix Xtend partner program, why an IPO from Trellix is not a probability in the near future and why acquisition activity will be a lot more likely from the company. “We do think over the next 12 months, there may be some opportunities to pick up some great companies,” he said.

What follows is an edited portion of CRN’s interview with Palma.