Stepping up its efforts to meet market demand for information security solutions, Hewlett-Packard South Africa is expanding its HP Praesidium product portfolio and increasing its consulting offerings.
The move comes in the wake of a global review of HP`s security solution set, the results of which have brought accolade from research and analyst groups - including IDC, Gartner Group, Hurwitz Group, and Forrester Research.
Gary de Menezes, software business manager at HP South Africa, believes that local financial, commercial and parastatal market sectors will feature strongly in the online business sector over the coming year. As a result, security will become one of the highest priorities.
"As the market matures we are seeing a clear trend towards Web-based transactions being increasingly viewed as critical to business success," explains de Menezes.
"Companies will therefore be looking to ensure the integrity and security of these transactions. But they will also want to protect their own resources and information - both from advanced Web server-based attacks and from internal hacking attempts. This is where the Praesidium modules come to the fore."
HP Praesidium consists of five products that together create the most what is touted as the most comprehensive security solution available for electronic business.
De Menezes is upbeat about the potential of delivering integrated solutions that include all of the above products - as well as enterprise hardware from the company`s sister division, HP Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS).
"We have seen many clients prefer an integrated approach requiring a broad combination of our software, hardware and services," he says.
"The fact that HP Praesidium products already protect a wide range of e-business applications and collaborations - ranging from protection o f human resource files at a retail outlet to enabling virtual design of nuclear power plants - stands our local efforts in good stead."
As aforementioned the analyst community would seem to agree. In its report on HP VirtualVault in January this year, GartnerGroup said: "HP is the only large platform vendor that offers a secured operating systems and as such, has a significant advantage over Sun, Microsoft, IBM and Compaq in the area of high stakes electronic commerce."
And the Hurwitz Trend Watch is also positive about the Praesidium portfolio. "This is not a marketing solution looking for a problem. As companies rollout electronic business applications, they should give serious consideration to securing their extranets with this combined offering," says a November 1998 report.
VirtualVault - protects the Web server and access to back-end applications during external access from customers, partners, and employees. With support for Java applications and WebQoS load balancing in the latest version, VirtualVault is able to protect almost 100 percent of currently available online banking applications available in the market.
DomainGuard -a multi-platform Web authorisation manager that controls the read, write, execute privileges of individual users of Web applications using powerful role-based security administration. DomainGuard Rules extends the capabilities of DomainGuard by allowing companies to also implement custom, pre-defined limits ("rules") on user Web transactions.
Authorisation Server - extends the security capabilities of DomainGuard Rules by adding support for multiple Web servers and APIs for legacy client-server applications.
Extranet VPN - an innovative extranet VPN (virtual private network) solution. This client/server security software authenticates users, encrypts data traffic, and controls the access privileges of users accessing specific intranet Web and non-Web resources from over the Internet.
e-Firewall - an application-level firewall, it provides businesses a high level of control over e-business communications at the boundary between the Internet and their intranet.
The Praesidium range is available through HP South Africa`s authorised reseller channel. For more information on the HP Praesidium products, please visit www.hp.com/security
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