Micro Focus Touts Expanded Security Portfolio After HPE Deal

Britain’s largest remaining tech firm Micro Focus has expanded its security portfolio, with enhanced offerings for the enterprise sector.

It comes after HPE sold its non-core software assets to Micro Focus in 2016, in a deal worth $8.8bn (£6.7bn). That transaction was completed late last month.

The expanded portfolio includes the launch of Voltage SecureData Cloud for AWS – an extension of SecureData, as well as “significant automation advancements to the Fortify application security portfolio”.

Security Enhancements

Micro Focus boasted at the Protect 2017 conference in Washington DC that its “comprehensive security solutions” now spans a wide range of areas including security operations, application security, identity and access management (IAM), and data security.

It believes its offerings will help businesses dealing with hybrid IT environments, but which are still having to contend with a growing threat landscape.

“The shift to hybrid IT and DevOps has made it imperative for organisations to move beyond securing the periphery, and take a holistic approach to securing their users, apps, data and the interactions between them,” explained John Delk, chief product officer and GM of the security product group at Micro Focus.

“Our new, expanded security portfolio opens up a unique opportunity for security teams – empowering customers with the solutions to protect their most sensitive assets and applications at scale, drive identity-centric control and obtain actionable insights across their environments.”

But what exactly is Micro Focus offering that is new?

Well ArcSight has apparently been updated, as ArcSight Data Platform (ADP) 2.2 delivers ‘native, real-time log parsing, security data enrichment and normalisation into the Event Broker for security operations that can scale to any data volume’.

It is worth noting here a new partnership with Elastic to provides IT and security teams with data that has been enriched for better visibility and customisation, within the search dashboards of Elastic.

Another update is ArcSight Investigate 2.0, which now comes with built-in security analytics displayed in pre-defined dashboards to provide actionable intelligence for front-line analysts.

And to help with hybrid IT environments, Change Guardian 5.0 can now monitor changes to Active Directory in the cloud (Azure Active Directory).

Another development here is the launch of SecureData Cloud for AWS. This is data-centric security hosted by AWS to help businesses accelerate the deployment of their hybrid cloud workloads.

And the Fortify portfolio has been enhanced to enable developers, IT and operations to test applications both in DevOps and in production, without disrupting the software development lifecycle through automation and analytics.

HPE Software

Micro Focus is in the processes of absorbing the non-core software assets of HPE.

A lot of these assets were gained from its deal in 2011 to acquire British software firm Autonomy, which turned sour for HPE, or HP at the time, and contributed in it writing off $8.8 billion.

And whilst the deal to gain some of HPE’s software assets has cost Micro Focus billion of pounds, it will boost the the annual revenues of Micro Focus and has helped it become a significantly enlarged company.

Indeed, Micro Focus now touts itself as one of the world’s largest infrastructure software companies with leading positions across a number of key products.

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