(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Designed to protect companies against online attacks waged by hackers, Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com) has released a new suite of application security software and services to help organizations ensure the security of their web applications by helping them discover, fix and prevent vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
The new offerings are part of HP’s Application Security Center, according to HP’s Wednesday announcement, and include HP Assessment Management Platform 8.0, HP WebInspect 8.0, and HP Software-as-a-Service.
HP Assessment Management Platform 8.0 is a distributed, scalable web application security testing platform, which helps customers reduce costs and mitigate application risk across the enterprise. HP WebInspect 8.0 helps companies analyze complex web applications including those built on emerging web 2.0 technologies. HP’s SaaS Project Services help customers rapidly and economically implement their application security initiatives with a complete solution maintained and managed by HP.
The new HP offerings help IT executives prioritize security issues by identifying the assets and data that matter most to their business, allowing them to focus their security resources on issues that have the greatest business impact.
“HP Application Security Center helps IT organizations manage the growing risk of security breaches that take place through web applications,” HP business technology optimization applications division vice president and general manager Jonathan Rende said in a statement. “Today’s application modernization efforts are creating a better end-user experience but it may also produce websites that are more vulnerable to hackers.”
According to nonprofit organization Identity Theft Resource Center, 35 million data records were compromised in 2008 in 656 admitted incidents, a 47 percent increase over the previous year.
Forrester Research security and risk management principal analyst Chenxi Wang said security breaches can cost companies dearly. “Forrester estimates that cost per record for a security breach is approximately $305 for companies in a highly regulated industry,” Wang said in a statement. “This cost can be prohibitively high for companies that handle hundreds of thousands or millions of data records.”
New legislation governing data breaches should also make enterprises more concerned over the security of their data.
HP WebInspect 8.0 and HP Assessment Management Platform 8.0 are available now as licensed software products, and HP Assessment Management Platform is expected to be available through HP SaaS in May, but will be demonstrated at the RSA 2009 Conference in San Francisco, April 20-24.
