HPE’s Project Aurora Tackles Cybersecurity Issues ‘Head-On’

‘Almost every customer we talk to has a zero trust initiative,’ says Comport Consulting CTO Erik Krucker. ‘HPE is addressing those security issues head-on, making customers feel comfortable about the security built into GreenLake.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprises’ new Project Aurora zero trust security architecture for the HPE GreenLake on-premise cloud service addresses ‘head-on’ the increased risk of ransomware and other cybersecurity threats, said HPE partners.

Project Aurora – one of the highlights of HPE’s Discover conference this week – provides what HPE CEO Antonio Neri is a calling a “revolutionary” security framework that ensures the edge-to-cloud GreenLake platform is secure from the user to the application and then all the way down to the operating system and firmware in the hardware. He said it “fortifies” a customer’s IT security investments.

“Security is all customers want to talk about with all these ransomware attacks like Colonial Pipeline and JBS,” said Erik Krucker, CTO at Comport Consulting, an HPE Platinum partner, No. 302 on the CRN SP500. “Everybody is concerned about security. I really like that HPE is talking about zero trust. Almost every customer we talk to has a zero trust initiative. HPE is addressing those security issues head on, making customers feel comfortable about the security built into GreenLake.”

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The Project Aurora initiative – which is currently being previewed by HPE – will be embedded in HPE’s GreenLake Lighthouse cloud services platform – the software that deploys multiple GreenLake cloud services with a few clicks- and also in GreenLake solutions themselves – by the end of the year, said Neri.

“The fact that customers know HPE is baking this zero trust into GreenLake goes a long way,” said Krucker (pictured above). “Customers don’t want to run a data center anymore. They are interested in talking to companies like us who can outsource security for them. They realize they can’t do it all themselves. I really like what HPE is doing with security with Project Aurora.”

The Project Aurora launch comes with ComportSecure’s virtual (SOC) business growing at a rapid clip, said Krucker. That service provides 24 hour a day, seven day a week security monitoring and remediation. The number of customers leveraging ComportSecure has doubled over the last year, said Krucker. “The managed SOC business along with our Palo Alto Networks and Aruba business is growing tremendously,” he said. “The top three things customers want to talk about is security, security and security.”

HPE GreenLake General Manager Keith White said he expects Project Aurora – which leverages open source security technology - to have a “dramatic” impact on ensuring secure on premise cloud services. “We do continuous attestation,” he said. “It automatically detects advanced threats from the silicon to the cloud in seconds compared to what takes days today.”

C.R. Howdyshell, president of Advizex, which just won HPE’s U.S. As-A-Service Partner of the Year award, said the Project Aurora built-in protection against ransomware and other security threats is another key area where HPE is ahead of competitors. “We’re seeing the investments from HPE to continue to maintain their lead in consumption and everything as a service,” he said.

Every customer is looking closely at security solutions in the wake of the constant ransomware security breaches, said Joe VanPatten, vice president of cloud consumption for Advizex,. “The ransomware issue is devastating, it is absolutely top of mind for every CIO,” he said.

GreenLake provides a consumption-based model for customers to provide a complete security solution fortified by Project Aurora and an Advizex managed security service, said VanPatten. “With everything as a service customers can pay for whatever additional security tools, hardware or cloud subscriptions needed via an as a service solution and then you can layer in the managed service or monitoring to make sure that you are protected 24/7 and have experts watching to make sure you are secure,” he said. “HPE is investing in the right areas with all of the tools they are building to enhance GreenLake and make it a better and more complete solution.”