HP unveils extensive security services package

Network World - Hewlett-Packard Co. today announced an extensive security-services portfolio that includes more than 90 basic offerings for application, identity and access management security to business continuity, cloud computing and managed services aimed at businesses and government.

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"It's everything from consulting to products to do it in-house to managed services and outsourcing," says Chris Whitener, chief strategist for HP Secure Advantage. He added that third-party products included in the portfolio, combined with HP's key management and logging systems, are pre-tested to assure compatibility and integration.

The unified HP Security, Compliance and Continuity Services portfolio is constituted as a "common reference model" that nearly 10,000 HP security professionals and consultants worldwide (since the acquisition of EDS in August 2008) are expected to use in interactions with customers.

Though the EDS brand is no longer officially used, the huge $13.9 billion acquisition of EDS transformed HP, making it a major player in enterprise services and outsourcing, with only IBM in the lead.

"We now have thousands of combined HP and EDS customers in the public sector, for instance, that we didn't have before," Whitener points out. By organizing security offerings into "buckets of services and well-known categories," he says, the goal is for HP, as part of integrating EDS, to make it as simple as possible for customers to assess their needs and pin down pricing based on their budgets.

One new service, for example, features what HP is calling "Cloud Computing Security Assessment," a service "to help people understand what they need to do to move things to the cloud ," Whitener says. This might involve examining how well the applications which they always thought their own IT departments would run might fare in a cloud-computing environment or whether policy violations related to privacy regulations or Payment Card Industry data-security requirements might arise.

HP's "Software-as-a-Service Project Services for Application Security Center" would address implementation of application-security initiatives in a configuration maintained and managed by HP.

HP is also starting its "Application Security Center of Excellence Services" to prevent attacks targeting Web applications. The goal is to help customers quickly define a strategy based on business risk and appropriate use of technology.