HP opens Sydney global security response centre

HP has started offering managed security services from its new global security response centre in Sydney.

HP's global security operations centre in Sydney.

The centre is HP's third alongside others in the US and UK. Arthur Wong, senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise Security Services, said although the company has been providing security services to Australia and the Asia Pacific region for some time now, the operations centre will provides the company with even more visibility of the threat landscape.

“We see 23 billion security events on a monthly basis, we manage and protect more than 500,000 security devices worldwide and we secure more than 47 million user accounts. The importance of this scale is that HP can see things that individual companies can’t see,” Wong said.

“If we see a particular attack in the US, we can probably prevent that same kind of attack in Australia - and vice versa. We see threats from every single part of the world, in every industry. Every time we see something, we can better protect a customer somewhere else."

Andrzej Kawalec, HP’s CTO for Enterprise Security Services, said the centre will allow HP to provide local companies with services that can identify and defend against attacks before they even happen.

Kawalec said most attacks are motivated by money, ego, entertainment or politics. As such, HP scans social media and public forums and chatrooms for information that could indicate a forthcoming attack.

“In addition to structured data, we are gathering information from unstructured data - through social media. To find geopolitical threat intelligence that is targeted at our clients,” he said.

“This kind of communication goes on in the hacker community all the time. We grab it and build a profile for our clients, we can provide them with actionable intelligence."

In addition to its three global security operations centres, HP also operates five regional security operations centres, dotted around the world.