U.K.-based security vendor Micro Focus International plc issued the first salvo of product announcements since its spin-off/merger deal with Hewlett Packard Enterprise closed earlier this month.
The multiple updates and launches, most of which are designed to help businesses secure hybrid cloud environments more effectively and help software developers tap into Micro Focus functionality more easily, were timed to coincide with Palo Alto, Calif.-based HPE’s Protect security conference, which took place in Washington D.C. this week and concluded yesterday.
The first of the new offerings, called Voltage SecureData Cloud for AWS, allows organizations to pull personal identifiers out of data stored in Amazon Web Services, so they can more easily share it and utilize it for analytics purposes without violating privacy regulations. Available later this month, the system extends protection that Voltage SecureData previously provided on-premises only to Amazon’s market-leading public cloud as well. The vendor plans to safeguard data in other public clouds the same way in the future.
“This is the first one we’re extending the capability to, but we’ll continue to look to develop to other cloud platforms, certainly, as we move forward,” says Travis Grandpre
director of product marketing for enterprise security at Micro Focus.
Version 5.0 of Micro Focus’s NetIQ Change Guardian privileged account management system, also announced this week and due to reach market later this month, will benefit users of another such cloud platform, Microsoft Azure. The forthcoming product will be capable of monitoring Azure Active Directory deployments and feeding any modifications it observes to a variety of security information and event management solutions.
“You can combine the correlated events that you’re getting from various parts of the platform with the details around who’s accessing the data and do they have rights to access that,” Grandpre says.
Also at Protect this week, Micro Focus announced that the new version of its ArcSight Data Platform solution, due in October, will feature an open architecture that enables it to integrate with third-party solutions. HPE, which still owned ArcSight a year ago, proclaimed its commitment to opening up that portfolio at last year’s Protect conference.
“Our customers in the market have known ArcSight to be very monolithic, closed, and hard to get data out of, and we have really ripped that apart to make the data accessible to a lot more technology and applications that need that data,” Grandpre says. “You don’t need to leverage all three or four aspects of the ArcSight platform to get value out of the suite.”
Elastic, a Mountain View, Calif. company that makes solutions for visualizing and analyzing data, is one of the first significant software vendors to take advantage of the ArcSight platform’s new openness.
“It’s a really great partnership for us, because those people who are developing their own dashboards and visualizations can take advantage of the security data and the categorization and normalization that we deliver through ArcSight,” Grandpre says.
Micro Focus also announced at Protect that:
- Version 2.0 of ArcSight Investigate, a threat-hunting solution for security analysts, will include built-in analytics capabilities powered by software from Vertica, a Micro Focus unit headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.
- The latest release of the Fortify application security solution offers enhanced automation features designed to enable users of DevOps development methodologies to test code without disrupting the software development lifecycle. Available immediately, the new Fortify update also adds support for the Scala programming language, bringing the total number of languages the product supports to 25.
HPE announced its intention to sell a significant chunk of its software portfolio to Micro Focus last September. That complex, roughly $8.8 billion “spin-merger” transaction, which was fully completed last week, left HPE with a 50.1 percent ownership stake in Micro Focus and its expanded product catalog. According to Grandpre, the new arrangement won’t affect the partnership between HPE and Micro Focus.
“We’ll continue with the things that we’ve already been working together on as a business,” he says. “I don’t see any change in the way that we do business.”
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