HP Wolf Connect, which allows for management of offline remote devices, is the latest piece of cheese in HP’s security stack.
Joanna Burkey, HP’s CISO
CHICAGO – At their Amplify Partner Conference here, HP has enhanced their remote security management with the announcement of HP Wolf Connect, an IT management connectivity that lets customers manage remote devices even when they are nominally unavailable, such as when they are powered down or offline. While HP previously saw security as a competitive differentiation for them, they view this enhancement as increasing their advantage, as well as providing additional margin for partners.
Joanna Burkey, HP’s CISO, said that the new offering is designed to address key challenges customers face because of the rise of hybrid work and its consequent making remote management more complex.
“As a CISO myself, I can see the issues that our customers are facing now, and how they react by changing their cyberstrategies,” Burkey told the partner audience during the afternoon keynote on Wednesday. “At HP, we can meet their needs by our new diffentiating capability through Wolf Connect.”
Wolf Security, which was launched in May 2021, is HP’s portfolio of hardware-enforced security and endpoint-focused security services around PCs and printers.
“Wolf Security’s goal is to give customers the layers they need to be resilience through defense in depth,” Burkey indicated, comparing defense in depth to a stack of Swiss cheese slices, each of which has holes in it, but when stacked with other pieces where the holes are in different places, the whole stack has the resilience of a solid block of cheese.
‘We don’t see perimeters any longer,” Burkey said. “Perimeter security is false thinking that lures us into feeling safe. It was predicated on a physical office and an on-prem network. Now we have enhanced all this with things including enhanced firmware BIOS security and browser isolation. We have seen the rise of cyberservices focused on cybersecurIty because many companies cant do it on their own, so it often makes sense to use service providers to augment ones that have already been designed.”
HP Wolf Connect uses a cellular-based network to let IT teams easily manage a dispersed hybrid workforce. This can reduce the time and effort needed to resolve support tickets, secure data from loss or theft to mitigate a potential breach and optimize asset management.
“HP Wolf Connect gives them more cheese to provide them with the ability to prevent further attacks,” Burkey noted.
Wolf Connect is also likely to be attractive to customers because it is designed to attach easily to what they have.
“Security teams are looking for two things right now, the ability to use what they already have and unlock value from it, and the ability to deploy technologies and tools that attach easily to themselves,” Burkey said. “Wolf Connect provides security out of the box that adds additional layers of protection that augment what they have, and services that make it all work as one. It’s really difficult to deploy something new, Wolf Connect’s ability to attach to that is a huge selling point for a practitioner.”
The technology innovation here is another key selling point. HP Wolf Protect and Trace with Wolf Connect is the world’s first software service that is able to locate, lock and erase a PC remotely, even when it’s turned off or disconnected from the Internet.
‘We are proud of the new functionality we are giving to equip our customers,” Burkey said. HP Wolf Connect and Trace with Wolf Connect provide a remote IT management solution that is highly secure, and especially useful for fleet management. Even if devices are off or not connected to the internet, the state or location of the device doesn’t matter any longer. In addition to contact and management, this also allows for remote and wipe to prevent data loss during a breach.”
Could this technology make it down to the consumer level. Perhaps, but there is the cost to consider until consumer demand really grows. Alex Cho, President of the Personal Systems Business at HP, said the value of the solution is also there for the consumer, but the plumbing in the device is necessary and means more cost.
“We can do it in a consumer device, but at what cost?, he said. “On the other side, the division between commercial and consumer is becoming less relevant, and scale will eventually bring a lower price point.”
“This one’s game changing and will create more differentiation and margin in PC sales,” Burkey concluded.
