HP Boosts DaaS with New Proactive Security Service, Adds Risk Management from Aon

Facing continued slowing growth in its consumer and commercial PC business, HP this week emphasized new opportunities for its partners to deliver a wide portfolio of proactive, managed security services to attach with its systems.

At its HP Reinvent conference in Houston this week, the company rolled out its new DaaS Proactive Security service, which will offer advanced reporting and threat assessments based on customer behavior.

The new DaaS Proactive Security offering, which builds on HP’s device as a service model of offering PCs on a subscription basis, will also include the option for cyber risk assessments and mitigation solutions from Aon, the global insurer and professional services provider that HP partnered with last year. Also, HP demonstrated a new advanced endpoint security tool called Sure Sense that uses AI and analytics to predict unknown threats.

“Our IT channels can look at a customer through a different lens that not necessarily a traditional PC-led channel partner can, and they can therefore have a fantastic economic solution, technology solution that is secure, dependable, that they can’t get from our competitors,” said CEO Dion Weisler, speaking at a media briefing at HP Reinvent this week.

The DaaS Proactive Security Service is an enhanced offering based on the company’s Sure Click technology, a solution HP launched two years ago with its premium EliteBook PCs that provides malware protection. Sure Click, which creates a hardware-based browsing session that isolates the code to a virtual machine when a user clicks on a link to a malicious site or malicious Microsoft Office or Adobe PDF files attached to emails, IM messages or on USB drives.

HP’s Alex Cho told attendees about new offerings from the company at HP Reinvent. (Photo: HP)

HP’s new DaaS option include an advanced version of Sure Click, which like the original, uses the VM technology it licensed from Bromium, lets threats play out in the isolated mode and then captures the telemetry of that activity and runs it through HP’s TechPulse analytics platform to provide a kill chain analysis of the malware. The DaaS Proactive Security service also provides endpoint protection compliance reports.

“This is significant because it goes beyond just security delivered in the hardware; it’s security that’s delivered as a service,” Alex Cho, vice president and general manager of HP’s commercial PC business, said at HP Reinvent. “It covers the HP and non-HP devices that are managed through HP DaaS.”

Many customers are struggling to hire and retain cybersecurity expertise and professionals, noted Bill Avey, vice president and general manager of HP Personal Systems Services, during a media briefing. “With the HP managed service plan, customers can have an extension of their IT team with the expertise to conduct analysis on threats and provide actionable insights to help them strengthen their security profile,” Avery said.

Kobi Elbaz, vice president and general manager of HP’s Personal Systems group, told Channel Futures that the program is open to all partners that go through the company’s certification process and said there’s ample demand for the service.

“When a customer moves to as a service, they want it to include a security-as-a-service solution, not only to make sure that their devices protected, but they want help if there is an attack,” Elbaz said. “With this new service, they have analytics to understand what happened, where this attack came from and we help the customer assess the risk up front.”

The latter is where Aon comes in. The service allows customers to …

… use Aon’s Cyber Quotient Evaluation (CyQu), an online assessment tool to determine what risk services an organization might require. “Knowing where you stand is the first step to strengthen any organization’s security,” Avery said.

The service includes a one-hour post-incident consultation. “Customers may also be eligible for advantage cyber insurance protection with enhanced terms and conditions and a streamlined application process to AON,” Avery said.

Timothy Lawlor, founder and CEO of RetroFit Technologies, a managed services provider and HP partner, said DaaS has become attractive to his commercial customers. “It’s become a very attractive model,” he said, adding there’s also increased demand for managed security services.

Meanwhile, HP demonstrated its Sure Sense technology at the conference. Sure Sense is a lightweight agent that currently runs on Windows PCs, that uses AI and deep learning to determine anomalies that might signify a potential threat that antimalware protection doesn’t detect. HP hasn’t decided how or when it will offer Sure Sense.