HPE Announces Comprehensive Security Innovations

As AI adoption accelerates and demands increase for supporting expanded operational scope in distributed environments, HPE is introducing new security innovations to help organizations safely leverage AI, maintain consistent governance, and reduce cyber risk. HPE is providing a solution that enables the extension of consistent protection across environments from the cloud to the core and to the edge, in the form of new HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 Series Firewalls, an expanded hybrid mesh security architecture, and enhanced resilience-focused features.

David Hughes, Senior Vice President and General Manager of SASE and Networking Security at HPE, stated:
"As we aim to maximize AI adoption and respond to distributed environments, security cannot be an afterthought or managed in isolation. Networking and security must be tightly integrated to reduce risk, improve visibility, and ensure the reliability customers demand. HPE supports customers in standardizing and enforcing policies across their distributed environments, enabling them to adopt AI with confidence while maintaining performance, resilience, operability, and control."

Expanding Carrier-Grade Security to the Edge
Integral security is a foundational component of HPE's autonomous network. By combining AI-native autonomous operations with embedded zero trust, shared visibility, and end-to-end policy enforcement, networks can achieve real-time optimization, self-healing, and self-protection. As AI adoption expands to stores, healthcare facilities, campuses, and branch offices, these environments are becoming the frontline for unmanaged AI access, inconsistent policy enforcement, and new pathways for data exposure.
The HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 Series extends carrier-grade security features to small-scale locations and space-constrained environments. With robust hardware protection, it supports a standardized security posture from core to edge, enhances tamper resistance, and helps ensure device integrity. The SRX400, with its compact form factor, high performance, and operational efficiency, helps prevent remote locations from becoming weak links in an organization's overall security strategy.

Enhanced Hybrid Mesh Capabilities Provide Enterprise-Grade Governance for AI Adoption
According to the Ponemon Institute's "2026 Global Study on Closing the IT Security Gap," sponsored by HPE, over half of organizations are leveraging AI. However, new challenges arise, increasing the need to reduce the risk of unintended access and sharing of confidential data while simultaneously improving productivity. HPE's latest enhancements to its hybrid mesh firewalls, through new visibility and policy control features, enable consistent AI adoption governance across distributed environments. Key features supporting organizations in adopting AI with confidence without hindering the use of new tools include:

* **Visibility and Access Management for AI Sites and Applications:** New control functions provide immediate insight into AI application usage. One-click access control and proactive blocking of unapproved or high-risk AI sites strengthen control and governance for AI adoption in distributed environments.
* **Prompt-Level Inspection:** To prevent data loss, security teams can now implement prompt-level inspection. This enables approved applications to be used without disrupting operations, while controlling keyword filtering and file uploads to external AI tools.
* **Centralized Identity-Based Protection:** A unified security fabric is provided across all environments, including physical, virtual, and containerized. Security policies are applied not just at the device level, but also at the user and workload levels, ensuring consistent control and governance across distributed environments.
* **AI-Native Operations:** HPE Security Director simplifies security operations by automating complex workflows and enabling responses aligned with industry best practices. Enhanced chatbot functionality provides step-by-step assistance and on-demand configuration guidance, offering operational support beyond basic troubleshooting.

Advanced Threat Intelligence and Implementation from HPE Threat Labs:
To stay ahead of increasingly sophisticated and severe cyber threats, HPE is integrating networking telemetry and expertise into HPE Threat Labs, an intelligence organization that translates research findings into implementation. This effort aims to enhance real-time, AI-native threat insights, enabling the rapid translation of accumulated threat intelligence into concrete countermeasures and supporting the industry's transition to an autonomous, zero-trust security architecture.
HPE Threat Labs has published its "In the Wild" cyber threat research report. This report analyzes 1,186 cyberattack campaigns observed globally from January 1 to December 31, 2025, revealing an evolution in the attacker ecosystem towards an industrial, strategically targeted form with advanced specialization and automation. The analysis indicates that attackers are efficiently deploying attacks targeting industries with significant social impact by exploiting known vulnerabilities and reusing attack infrastructure, leading to larger, more organized, and faster attack activities.
The report emphasizes that effective defense requires strengthening visibility, collaboration, and response capabilities across the entire network, rather than simply adding more security tools. It recommends extending security measures to home and supply chain environments, sharing threat intelligence, applying zero trust, and AI-native detection to reduce risk and enhance response capabilities against increasingly sophisticated and organized threats.
The English press release is available here.

Responding to Evolving and Escalating Threats with Embedded Security:
HPE is deploying enhanced features with sovereign-ready security and resilience across its software, storage, and server product portfolios. This supports protection and rapid recovery of critical business workloads, enabling customers to maintain stable operations even in an environment of escalating threats.

* **Enhanced Workload and Recovery Resilience:** HPE is strengthening cyber recovery and disaster recovery capabilities for virtualized and cloud environments with HPE Zerto Software. This includes expanding recovery target platforms, adding new recovery runbooks, enhancing support for AI and AI-related workloads (including vGPU), and integrating with Microsoft Defender. Furthermore, secure direct access to immutable data on HPE StoreOnce enables malware scanning and cyber forensics, facilitating rapid recovery to a known clean state.
* **Confidential Computing:** HPE Morpheus Software is enhanced with Confidential Computing capabilities to further strengthen its sovereign-ready security foundation. By combining hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) from AMD and Intel with centralized key management via Thales CipherTrust, HPE maintains encryption for data even while in use. This supports secure operation of workloads handling sensitive data in hybrid and air-gapped environments, meeting sovereign and regulatory requirements.
* **Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) Support:** To address the anticipated threat to current encryption technologies from quantum computing, HPE has added Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) support to Junos OS Evolved. Additionally, broad PQC support is planned for Junos in Summer 2026. These updates comply with NIST standards and include upgraded cryptographic libraries supporting FIPS 203/204, FIPS 204-based software signing, and quantum-buffering for SSH. This update further strengthens HPE's extensive PQC support across its portfolio, including HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers with HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) 7.
These security solutions are designed to provide comprehensive control, compliance, and protection, even in air-gapped environments, as organizations adopt sovereign IT infrastructure.

Availability:

* HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 Series Firewalls and new AI governance features for Hybrid Mesh Firewalls: Available in Q2 2026.
* HPE Zerto Software 10 (next version): Available April 2026 / HPE StoreOnce OS 5.2: Available now.
* Confidential Computing in HPE Morpheus Software: Available in Q3 2026.
* HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) 7 supporting new Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standards: Available Summer 2026.

Notes:
* (Note 1) The 2026 global study on closing the IT security gap (Published February 2026)
This survey report is based on the following countries and number of respondents: USA (658), UK (305), Germany (408), Australia (190), Japan (450), France (208).
* (Note 2) The HPE Threat Labs 2026 In the Wild Threat Report was compiled using multiple intelligence sources. The majority of statistical data presented in this report is based on telemetry information provided by customer environments of Juniper Advanced Threat Prevention Cloud and HPE's independently operated global honeypot network. These honeypots support protocols such as TCP, SSH, and SMB, are distributed worldwide, and are designed to capture diverse threat activities. Contextual information and statistical data from open-source threat intelligence repositories and select trusted third-party industry groups are also used as supplementary data where necessary. The reporting period for the data presented in this report is from January 1, 2025, to December 31, 2025.