Team HP: Cloud Police
When HP announced it was exploring options for its PC business, the company said it’d move into the more profitable arena of enterprise solutions. From a speech given at HP’s yearly Security conference yesterday, the titan is eyeing up cloud security as a big growth area.
Policing the cloud and monitoring employee mobiles are two of the big challenges faced by businesses in the next few years, said Tom Reilly, HP VP and general manager for Enterprise Security Products. HP wants to be there, selling them ways to help them fix it.
Business will need help storing information safely in the cloud and the increasing numbers of staff bringing smartphones and tablets into work makes for another security headache, Reilly said, according to a report of the speech on AllThingsD.
This is the seventh year of HP’s annual cybersecurity symposium Protect 2011 and the largest to date, according to their press release. Reilly himself is a buy-in from cyber-security firm ArcSight which HP acquired in 2009.
HP has signalled its interest in the cloud before: CEO Leo Apotheker talked cloud in March this year at the HP Summit in San Francisco. Though some of their efforts to become a cloud-computing business have come under criticism – as The Reg explores here, this is the area the company is propelling itself into after deciding – probably – to drop the personal-system hardware side of its business in August.
A recent spate of press releases by Hewlett Packard emphasise its focus on cloud services – particularly cloud security services: “Government leaders talk cloud, cost savings with HP“; “Innovating today for the network demands of tomorrow“; and “HP Research Reveals 56 Percent Rise in Cost of Cybercrime“.
Looks like that’s where they see the money. ®
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/12/hp_position_themselves_as_the_cops_of_the_cloud/