In a recent interaction with CIO&Leader, Sharda Tickoo, Country Manager for India & SAARC at Trend Micro, shared her insights into the evolving cybersecurity landscape. With over 17 years of experience, Sharda has held leadership roles at EY and Reliance, where she helped organizations design and implement robust cybersecurity controls and technologies.

Country Manager, India & SAARC,
Trend Micro
In her current role, Sharda leads a team of highly skilled cybersecurity professionals dedicated to identifying vulnerabilities in enterprise environments, strategizing mitigation plans, and ensuring the implementation of secure solutions. She highlighted the challenges posed by Generative AI (Gen AI), emphasizing the importance of visibility and proactive security measures. Sharda also discussed Trend Micro’s innovations, including their AI-driven Trend Vision One platform, and the company’s strategic focus on technology consolidation and talent development for 2025. Excerpts from the conversation
CIO&Leader: What challenges do you foresee for CIOs with Generative AI (Gen AI), and how is Trend Micro addressing them?
Sharda Tickoo: The first major challenge is visibility. Reflecting on the early days of cloud adoption, businesses often moved rapidly to the cloud, leaving security teams unaware. We anticipate a similar, if not larger, challenge with Generative AI. Security teams might lack insights into the extent of Gen AI usage, creating critical blind spots.
At Trend Micro, we empower clients with tools that provide visibility into Gen AI applications. For instance, our solutions help organizations monitor Gen AI usage, ensuring security teams are informed and prepared.
Another challenge lies in how organizations use Gen AI. Some businesses are building their own large language models (LLMs), while others rely on publicly available tools, both of which carry unique risks. For example, compromised training data—known as model poisoning—could cause models to behave unpredictably. Similarly, prompt injection attacks can manipulate Gen AI tools to produce unintended or harmful responses, akin to SQL injection in traditional databases.
Organizations also face challenges controlling the data uploaded to Gen AI tools and managing their outputs. As digital footprints expand, attack surfaces increase, and Gen AI is no exception.
CIO&Leader: How does your solution address these challenges, and what makes it unique?
Sharda Tickoo: Tackling AI-related risks requires an integrated platform rather than isolated solutions. Our Trend Vision One platform provides comprehensive visibility, control, and security for Gen AI use cases.
Key features of the platform include:
- Visibility into Gen AI app usage, highlighting uploaded and downloaded content.
- Threat detection capabilities for risks like model poisoning, prompt injection, and jailbreaking.
- Granular controls to manage data usage, ensuring sensitive information remains secure while maintaining productivity.
We emphasize responsible AI usage. Instead of blocking Gen AI tools outright—which can hinder productivity—we enable controlled access. For example, organizations can regulate what data employees upload or filter inappropriate tool-generated responses.
Additionally, our partnership with NVIDIA strengthens our capabilities, enabling us to secure AI data centers for safe and efficient enterprise adoption.
CIO&Leader: How does Trend Micro ensure security across hybrid IT environments?
Sharda Tickoo: Hybrid IT environments are indeed more complex than traditional setups. With users working from various locations and accessing applications differently, security solutions must be adaptable.
Our Vision One platform addresses this by providing contextual awareness, assessing risk across users, applications, and processes. This ensures comprehensive security across the IT ecosystem, including networks, clouds, and operational technology (OT).
We offer flexible deployment options, including SaaS, hybrid, and on-premises solutions. For air-gapped environments—such as in the defense sector—we provide purpose-built offerings where external connectivity is restricted.
CIO&Leader: How is AI enhancing your threat detection and response capabilities?
Sharda Tickoo: At Trend Micro, we focus on security for AI and AI for security. For the latter, we leverage advanced AI models to enhance threat detection and response. Predictive threat analysis maps attack paths and identifies vulnerabilities, enabling proactive defense.
Our AI-powered tools, like the Micro Companion, automate tasks for Level 1 analysts, generating root cause analysis reports and actionable recommendations, allowing analysts to focus on complex challenges.
We’ve also developed an LLM trained on three decades of threat data, powering our detection models with unmatched accuracy. These capabilities extend to identifying threats like deepfakes and business email compromises, which are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
CIO&Leader: What are your strategic priorities for 2025?
Sharda Tickoo: Our primary focus is to make the Vision One platform accessible to all enterprises, enabling technology consolidation. Over time, fragmented solutions have complicated security operations. Our platform streamlines these operations into a unified solution.
We are also expanding in India by growing our R&D centers in Bangalore and Ahmedabad and addressing the cybersecurity talent gap by hiring specialized professionals.
On the technology front, we’re emphasizing attack surface risk management (ASRM), providing internal and external risk assessments across endpoints, networks, servers, cloud, and OT environments.
CIO&Leader: What cybersecurity trends do you foresee in 2025?
Sharda Tickoo: Several trends are emerging. Deepfake-related threats are expected to become more prevalent, enabling fraudulent activities. Ransomware tactics are evolving, with attackers using legitimate tools to disguise their activities. Supply chain attacks and vulnerabilities in public-facing assets will also remain significant concerns. Additionally, geopolitical tensions will likely drive cyberattacks by activist groups.
Organizations must adopt a proactive approach to address these challenges. By leveraging AI and advanced threat detection tools, we can help them stay ahead of these evolving threats.
CIO&Leader: What are your plans for R&D and talent acquisition?
Sharda Tickoo: Cybersecurity skill shortages are a global challenge. We are investing in hiring specialized professionals who can bridge the gap between business needs and cybersecurity strategies. Our focus is on roles that support use case-based discussions with customers, enabling tailored solutions.
On the R&D front, our centers in Bangalore and Ahmedabad will continue to grow. These centers play a critical role in developing innovative solutions and supporting