HP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire encryption provider Voltage Security.
Sitting alongside its other security offerings: SIEM technology ArcSight, integrator Vistorm and code review service Fortify, the acquisition of Voltage Security will complement HP Atalla, HP’s information security and encryption business.
Art Gilliland, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise security products said that the announcement aligns with HP’s focus on end-to-end protection of the data itself, helping enterprises neutralise the impact of a breach and proactively combat new security threats.
“Voltage’s powerful data-centric protection solutions will join the HP Atalla portfolio, expanding HP’s offerings in data classification, payments security, encryption, tokenization and enterprise key management,” he said.
“With Voltage, HP plans to offer customers unparalleled data protection capabilities built to close the gaps that exist in traditional encryption and tokenization approaches. This is particularly important for enterprises that interact with financial payments systems, manage workloads in the cloud, or whose sensitive data flows into Hadoop for analytics – making them attractive targets for cyber attackers.”
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of fiscal 2015, subject to customary closing conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Javvad Malik, security analyst at 451 Research, told IT Security Guru that there is interest in encryption, but the commitment to the solution isn’t really evidenced.
“We see that the majority of encryption in enterprises is whole disk encryption (so you don’t lose an unencrypted laptop like Nationwide) and some email encryption,” he said. “Cloud is interesting particularly for EU firms which will have some selective encryption or tokenization to protect personally identifiable information and use the public cloud.
“Larger companies seem to be making crypto more a feature than a standalone product to push – so you get the whole end-to-end protection bundled in with other layers. Larger and higher end companies are probably more focused on key management and maintaining control or using HSM’s both on premise and in the cloud – but it is early days and remains out of the technical realm of most.”
