Hewlett-Packard Co. is making its own contribution to the raft of security products sweeping across the floor of the RSA Conference this morning with the launch of new behavioral analytics functionality aimed at helping organizations catch insider threats before any serious harm can be done. That has long been a pain point in the enterprise.

The average breach passes eight months before detection, the head of IBM’s national security business told SiliconANGLE, providing ample time for hackers to slowly chip away the defenses of their target. The difficulty of providing prompt incident response has been directly linked to many of the biggest attacks in recent memory, most notably the attack on JPMorgan Chase & Co. that compromised over 70 million households.

That particular breach saw hackers use log-in credentials stolen from an employee to gain the initial access into the bank’s internal systems, an approach accounting for the majority of the insider tracks that the new ArcSight User Behavior Analytics (UBA) toolkit from HP aims to address. It combs data from an organization’s network for signs that indicate that an employee account may have been hijacked by a malicious party.

The information is piped through the company’s homegrown logging and event management software to number-crunching technology from Securonix
Inc. that searches for suspicious behavior. If, for example, an account belonging to an executive with access to sensitive information suddenly starts sending out large numbers of emails to unknown addresses, that activity is flagged and quickly brought to the attention of administrators through the built-in alert system.

Taking into account that knowledge workers are doing more and more of their work in the public cloud, HP is complementing UBA with an access management platform also being introduced at RSA that extends that control beyond the four walls of the data center. The offering is based on a similar partnership with another emerging provider of behavior analytics called Addalom Inc., which recently raised $30 million in a funding round that not coincidently included a contribution from HP, which is a long-time customer as well as investor.

The new Cloud Access Security Protection platform uses the startup’s technology to regulate and monitor activity in software-as-a-service environments, adding the company’s own encryption capabilities on top to ensure that hackers can’t extract any benefit from files they do manage to steal. The solution is specifically geared toward companies in highly regulated industries such as financial services and health care that deal with personally identifiable information requiring tighter control than what most cloud operators provide.