5 Security Technology Updates Micro Focus Unleashed At Protect 2017

Focused On Security

Following the completion of its $8.8 billion spin-merger of HPE Software, Micro Focus took its newly acquired security technologies up a notch. At Protect 2017, held in Washington, D.C., this week, Micro Focus unveiled five updates to its security technologies, which include ArcSight, SecureData, Fortify and NetIQ. Travis Grandpre, director of product marketing, said the updates show the start of a faster innovation cycle emerging at Micro Focus, which is now the seventh largest pure-play software company.

"That's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to almost redefine security," Grandpre said of the changes. There is an opportunity for Micro Focus to now, with the HPE Software assets, provide better security for data, applications and the cloud, he said. Take a look at the company's first five steps in that direction.

ArcSight Data Platform 2.2

Micro Focus undertook a significant shift in its ArcSight platform. ArcSight traditionally has been known to be "monolithic, complex and closed," said Grandpre, but Micro Focus has flipped that approach on its head, deconstructing it to make it modular and open to integration. With this new modular approach, partners and customers can leverage any piece of or data from the ArcSight platform within their security operations, he said.

"That's a big shift for us and a shift for the security operations market at large. We're trying to have a new definition of what security operations means," Grandpre said.

Micro Focus kicked off that open approach with a new partnership with search, logging and analytics software provider Elastic. The new partnership allows IT and security operations to build their own set of dashboards, customization and visualization for data, according to Grandpre. That process is accelerated with the integration because the data already has been normalized and enriched through the ArcSight technology, he said.

ArcSight Investigate 2.0

Micro Focus unveiled a second update to the ArcSight platform with the launch of ArcSight Investigate 2.0, a tool Grandpre said is the "next step in the direction of making security investigation and search more purpose-built and intuitive for security analysts." The 2.0 update brings more built-in analytics capabilities to the ArcSight SIEM offering, powered by the Vertica big data analytics solution. This update will help security investigation teams using ArcSight to more easily leverage security intelligence and analytics for security decision-making, he said. The ArcSight Investigate 2.0 offering will be available in October.

Change Guardian 5.0

As more companies move to the cloud, Micro Focus said it is looking to help them monitor changes to those environments with updates to its NetIQ Change Guardian solution. NetIQ Change Guardian 5.0 leverages the existing integration with ArcSight to bring identity capabilities to the correlation of events, as well as user control access changes and policy changes. The changes also allow companies to leverage those capabilities across hybrid IT environments, including monitoring changes to Active Directory in the cloud. These updates as especially important for MSSP partners of ArcSight, as it allows them to better handle multitenancy with real-time correlation of events, Grandpre said.

SecureData Cloud For AWS

As more data moves to the cloud, data security solutions – especially for sensitive data – are more important than ever, Grandpre said. Micro Focus launched AWS hosting for SecureData, allowing companies to natively host SecureData in the cloud and giving them faster access to managing security policies around that data. Companies will see faster security and a quicker time to value with the cloud, according to Grandpre.

"This is a really big step for us in supporting the hybrid cloud trend that is the direction so many of our big customers are moving towards," he said. Micro Focus "will certainly be continuing to look at support beyond that" for other cloud platforms, including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Grandpre added.

Fortify Updates

As more companies look to embrace an Agile software development model, Micro Focus unveiled updates to its Fortify offering to help companies secure those applications along the way. The offering is now 10 to 15 times faster in scanning for vulnerabilities through the development life cycle, 10 times faster in remediating those vulnerabilities, and allows for 30 times faster time to market, Grandpre said.

"That to me is really huge because the more quickly you build an application and get it to market, the better for business if you know it is secure," Grandpre said. The company is seeing "increased demand" for application security, according to Grandpre, adding it is one of the four fastest-growing subsegments of security.