HP is running with the theme of “Security for the new reality” throughout this week at the HP Protect 2013 event in Washington D.C. To bolster that they are working with customers to rethink their security strategies to deal with today’s real security threats. It’s a landscape of threats that isn’t quite covered by traditional security models. Organizations today must manage risk and have a real-time vision of what is going on in the enterprise in order to protect data. Cybercrime is on the rise, as we see evidenced in daily reports of data breaches. Cyber criminals are getting more and more sophisticated. Report after report tell us of the costly impacts of this cyber breach activity. Attacks are clandestine, patient, and targeted – sometimes the data leaks are willful from within the organization itself, sometimes it is unintentional. There’s also a thriving black market filled with zero-day malware, custom applications designed to breach most any type of target you wish to subvert and for which by definition there is no endpoint protection that can stop it. Doing business is also becoming more complex, with more businesses nowadays working on a world platform, often in the cloud, and under all sorts of legislation and requirements. New risks like mobile devices, web applications and the infrastructure that drives them are points of risk that need thorough management.

HP is answering that with a lineup of new products and services that focus on the enterprise and are designed to make the security prospect less a burden and more of a tactical point of abilities throughout an organization.

In a briefing with Frank Mong, Vice President and General Manager, Solutions, HP Enterprise Security Products we dove into a number of these announcements and talked about the tremendous security value they propose to business.  All the products are designed to be easy to integrate, easy to manage, and easy to analyze.

NGFW HP TippingPoint Next-Generation Firewall 

The first announcement is a next-gen firewall lineup built for enterprise data center and core networks with attention on the increasingly borderless nature of today’s security challenges. A new family of HP TippingPoint Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliance has hit the scene with five announced models. The product is designed to meet complex present-day demands integrating protection within applications, cloud environments, mobility, and an ever elastic perimeter.

“In a world where personal mobile devices dominate the workplace and organizations have less control of network access points, security solutions must extend protection beyond the perimeter to disrupt the adversary on all fronts,” said Rob Greer, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Security Products, TippingPoint, HP. “The introduction of the HP TippingPoint Next-Generation Firewall is a natural extension of our leading network solutions portfolio, enabling us to stop the attacks at every control point across and beyond the enterprise network.”

HP Threat Central – A Community Intelligence Platform

The next big announcement was the introduction of a community-source security intelligence platform designed to combat the most sophisticated cyber threats in a zero-day information network. Known as HP Threat Central and developed with HP Labs, the platform is built to connect to thousands of community members around the world to share data about threats, to leverage the crowd to analyze potential threats, and to provide rapid mitigation techniques that can help prevent damage from potential attacks. It’s an approach that asserts that knowledge is one of the best tools in prevention and protection from computer threats.

“Adversaries today organize around an underground marketplace for sharing resources and techniques to mount increasingly advanced attacks that cause extensive damage to organizations around the globe,” said Jacob West, chief technology officer, Enterprise Security Products, HP. “To combat collaborative attackers, enterprises must join together by sharing targeted intelligence confidentially and in real time to create a unified industry defense.”

HP ArcSight Analytics and Fortify – Protecting Applications in the Wild

Finally the company has announced a data-driven solution that implements advanced analytics in the detection of threats that extends into the growing world of applications. Until now, the pace of evolution in applications has been something that largely did not have a thorough security element to it. The deployment and diversity of applications is on the upswing across the industry, exploding in variety, utility, amount of data being handled – all of that is a security concern. New HP ArcSight solutions and HP Fortify have been streamlined to find, assess, and remedy threats that come from applications, protecting an organization’s assets using big data constructs. Known as HP ArcSight Application View, the product levels the integration of its SIEM platforms, ArcSight ESM and ArcSight Express with HP Fortify Runtime to automatically detect and log application security events. HP ArcSight Risk Insight is an add-on also introduced for ArcSight ESM and is designed to help security teams identify, categorize and analyze the risk level of various threats.

“The exploding volume of data that organizations today must manage presents new security challenges as they try to predict, locate and disrupt cyberthreats,” said Haiyan Song, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Security Products, ArcSight, HP. “The newly expanded HP ArcSight portfolio delivers solutions that help security teams and SOCs prioritize risk, automate application-level threat detection and streamline security management to reduce exposure and increase effectiveness of protecting valuable data from internal and external theft.”

HP’s announcements out of the HP Protect event are extensive and worth a read if you are an enterprise customer. In addition to various product announcements, HP also has announcements around its services which are part of the event. In all, HP continues to build one of the most impressive security product and services portfolios in the industry. The products are absolutely as forward-looking as any one individual product in the industry and they are applying the best of technology and services to achieve an exemplary and critical place in the enterprise security landscape.