The numbers are staggering: Estimates suggest that cybercrime could cost $10.5 trillion by 2025, and the average total cost of a data breach is $4.35 million.

Businesses have too much to lose, according to Kevin Depew, senior director of future server architecture at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. That’s why the company decided to look across the industry to solve these problems and deliver its Gen11 products with partners like Advance Micro Devices Inc.

“We know we can’t solve the problem alone, and we know the issue is huge,” Depew said. “So we’re really partnering with all the right players to ensure we have a secure solution so we can stay ahead of the bad guys to try to limit the attacks on our customers.”

Depew and David Chang (pictured), data center solutions marketing lead at AMD, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Lisa Martin for a special “HPE Compute Security” launch event during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed HPE’s security strategy, why the company’s security solutions are trusted, and how HPE is partnering with AMD to stay ahead. (* Disclosure below.)

Staying ahead of the bad guys

The number of cyberattacks has continually increased over the years and appears to be accelerating even faster. Among Microsoft operating environments, the number of attacks in the last year is up 50% yearly, according to Depew. It has led to high-level conversations among HPE’s customers, who have cited cybersecurity as a top issue.

“We’re hearing this is huge, this is too big of a risk. ‘How do you protect us? And by the way, we only have limited bandwidth, so what can we do?’” Depew said. “What we can do is make them assured that the platform is secure, that we’re creating a foundation for a very secure platform, and that we’ve worked with our partners to secure all the pieces.”

HPE makes that happen by designing its own ASIC for its Baseboard Management Controller — the iLO 6 used on Gen11, as well as through the company’s firmware stack, its iLO firmware, and its system Unified Extensible Firmware Interface firmware.

“We have to think like the bad guys. What could the bad guy take advantage of? What could the bad guy exploit?” Depew said. “So, we try to think like them so that we can protect our customers.”

Building on partnerships

HPE has been working with AMD for almost 20 years — the partnership goes back to 2004, when the company delivered its HP ProLiant DL585 server.

Years before a processor was announced, the companies worked together. HPE looks at AMD’s designs to help improve them, while AMD informs HPE about its technology so they can take advantage of it in its designs.

“They have a lot of security capabilities, like their memory encryption technologies, their AMD secure processor, their secure encrypted virtualization, which is an absolutely unique and breakthrough technology to protect virtual machines and hypervisor environments and protect them from malicious hypervisors,” Depew said. “So they have some really great capabilities that they’ve built into their processor.”

Security is only as strong as the layer below it, so HPE and AMD developed a layered approach to protecting critical data together, according to AMD’s Chang.

“We provide the confidence of built-in silicon authentication on the world’s most secure industry-standard servers with a 360-degree approach that brings high availability to critical workloads while helping to defend against internal and external threats,” Chang said. “Things like HPE’s Silicon Root of Trust with the trusted supply chain, which obviously AMD’s part of that supply chain, combined with AMD’s Infinity Guard technology, really helps provide that end-to-end data protection in today’s business.”

Here’s the complete video interview with Kevin Depew and David Chang:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “HPE Compute Security” livestream event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE