Hewlett-Packard Co has expanded its security range from product to partner, signaling its intent to shift security from the network to the application level. It has added integration with Ariba resource management applications, developed security features for HP’s Virtual Vault with BMC Software and signed an implementation deal with Ernst & Young. BMC’s SafePassage adds to HP’s Virtual Vault load-balancing and monitoring facilities to ensure users on NT, HP, Solaris and Microsoft Exchange servers are connecting to a valid application. HP will bundle SafePassage with Virtual Vault.
The theory is that a company’s mission critical resources are all in applications. The firewall still acts as a network protector, but Virtual Vault is the gatekeeper for the applications, ensuring that users only access what they are authorized to see. The growth of extranets means that the frontier between corporate networks and the web is increasingly fuzzy, making protection of company data necessary at the lowest level.
Virtual Vault release 4.0 adds Solaris and NT versions to HP-UX, a move which Lior Arussy, HP director of worldwide marketing estimates as quintupling HP’s security market. It will be shipping in early November. It also includes compliance with HP’s new L, N, A and R class servers, and a mirror disk facility, with each disk’s data duplicated on another, saving back-up and recovery times for mission-critical applications.
HP’s eFirewall 6.0, Raptor firewall technology licensed from Axent Technologies, brings Unix security, traditionally more expensive than NT, to similar levels. Whereas the NT version costs around $17,000, Raptor 6.0 for HP-UX will cost $23,000 with all hardware and software, a far cry from the $35,000 to $40,000 range.
HP’s integration with Ariba’s software is the first of a spate of planned application linking. Praesidium will look to the supply chain sector, closely followed by front-office vendors over the next 12 months. Among the selected partners are Peoplesoft, Oracle, i2 and Lotus.
Authorization is still a gap in HP’s range. The current strategy is to use products from Baltimore, Entrust, Verisign and GTE CyberTrust, all of which are interoperable with Praesidium. However, HP will look to fill the space with software of its own in the next 12 months.
