Also at RSA, HP is launching a Cloud Connections Partner Program to extend security protections for on-premise IT assets to private or public cloud environments. Although some as-yet-unnamed partners will be announced at the show, existing HP partners include Box, for file sharing in the cloud, and Okta, an on-demand identity and access management provider. HP also partners with a company called Coalfire, a Payment Card Industry (PCI) auditing firm, to help HP customers maintain compliance with PCI compliance requirements.
Security is extended to mobile devices that are being more widely used in the workplace, and this is where the Fortify acquisition fits in. Fortify scans newly created mobile applications that support the HTML5 Web applications standard or that are written in Objective-C, the language used to write apps for Apple iPhone and iPad devices. The idea is to spot risks before the app is deployed, says HP's McIrvine.
"Fortify will scan that app because it understands the language and the platform that is targeted. It will identify where the weakness is, ... but it will also provide you a recommendation on how to fix it," he says.
Fortify also protects in the data center, he continues, because an attack on a mobile app could provide an attacker with access to a database server inside the network. This would possibly enable the attacker to create havoc elsewhere in the enterprise. What he calls a "runtime analyzer" can monitor network traffic into the data center from the mobile device. "If something it detects is malicious, the real time analyzer can stop the app in its tracks," McIrvine says.
Furthermore, if the app is vulnerable but mission-critical and can't be taken out of service for remediation, Tipping Point can intervene, identify the attack signature of the threat and block that specific threat. "I want to let my normal customers use it. But the bad guys, I want you to block every attempt," McIrvine says, citing an example of how the different HP security acquisitions are complementary.
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