HP to Bring Bromium Security Technology to SMBs with Select Commercial PCs

HP will roll out enhanced security offerings in the coming months, including hardware-based advanced threat protection options for small and medium businesses (SMBs) and an upgrade of the Proactive Security service the company introduced last year.

The company revealed the security enhancements Wednesday, during what was scheduled to be the second day of HP’s Reinvent partner and customer conference in Anaheim, California, which like most events was canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

HP is doubling down on delivering advanced threat protection to SMBs with the launch of its HP Pro Security Edition, which the company initially will deliver on its commercial Elite desktop and notebook PCs this summer, with system-level versions of its HP Sure Sense AI-based threat detection technology and HP Sure Click Pro tools.

Notably, HP is expanding the endpoint virtualization and application isolation technology to SMBs that it gained with last year’s acquisition of Bromium. HP had previously licensed Bromium’s endpoint virtualization technology offered with its HP Sure Click solution.

Sure Click isolates key applications such as Office documents and web browsers into their own virtual containers, which keeps malware from leaking outside of the virtual machine, which is deleted once the application is closed.

The company initially offered Sure Click Pro, a premium endpoint virtualization-based threat protection capability for enterprises. HP broadened the Sure Click solution as a managed service last year, targeting midsize organizations with the Proactive Security service, which the company will expand in April when it releases the pilot of the offering as a managed service.

Based on HP’s network monitoring telemetry, 43% of breaches are targeted at SMBs, according to Ian Pratt, global head of security for HP’s commercial systems group. In a media briefing discussing today’s release, Pratt, who was previously Bromium’s co-founder and CEO, noted that small businesses are prime targets for cybercriminals because there are more of them, and many lack the resources to adequately protect themselves.

HP’s Ian Pratt

“They go where it’s easiest; they go where they can get the most return on investment for the effort they’re putting in and that is disproportionately small businesses,” Pratt said. “The bad guys treat bypassing traditional antivirus really as just part of the QA process before they release their malware in the wild. They’re going to make sure that it gets past all of the common products.”

Looking to get SMBs to try the capabilities of Sure Click Pro, the company will offer a free download through Sept. 30, appealing to the many who have suddenly found themselves working at home because of COVID-19. It will work with HP and non-HP PCs.

“It also shows them sort of democratizing some key aspects of the Bromium technology through virtualization,” said TECHnalysis analyst Bob O’Donnell.

“They’re not giving the entire Bromium suite; they are taking some of those core technologies in terms of an AI-based engine that can run locally, as well as leveraging the virtualization capabilities of both Intel and AMD CPUs,” he added, referring to the forthcoming new Intel 11^th Generation Core (“Tiger Lake”) processors and next-gen AMD Ryzen chips. “These are all important steps and clever ways to use existing technologies to provide a more secure environment for both small and medium businesses, as well as enterprises that have not chosen to use the Bromium technology in the past.”