HPE strengthens AI security with new innovations that help organizations scale distributed operations and reduce cyber risk. With zero trust, hybrid mesh architecture and post-quantum readiness, HPE bolsters enterprise resilience in a rapidly expanding AI era.
HPE (NYSE: HPE) today announced a set of security innovations designed to help organizations scale distributed operations, reduce cyber risk and maintain consistent governance as enterprise AI adoption accelerates. To help companies deploy AI safely and make resilience a core capability, HPE introduced the HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 Series firewalls, an extended hybrid mesh security architecture, and resilience-focused enhancements to extend consistent protection across cloud, core and edge environments.
“In the AI era, security can no longer be built or managed in isolation. As AI workloads scale across distributed locations, networking and security must be tightly integrated to reduce risk, improve visibility, and deliver the trust organizations require,” said David Hughes, SVP & GM, SASE and Security for Networking, HPE. “HPE helps customers standardize policies and apply them consistently across distributed environments so they can adopt AI with confidence while preserving performance, resilience, manageability and control.”
Carrier-grade security at the edge
Integrated security is a core element of HPE’s self-driving network, combining autonomous, AI-driven operations with built-in zero trust, shared visibility and comprehensive policy enforcement so networks can optimize, self-heal and protect at machine speed. As AI extends into stores, clinics, campuses and branch offices, these distributed locations increasingly become the frontline for unmanaged AI access, inconsistent policy enforcement and new paths for data exposure.
The HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 Series brings carrier-grade security efficiency to smaller sites and space-constrained environments, supporting a standardized security posture from core to edge with hardware-based protections that help defend against tampering and establish trusted device integrity. With high performance and streamlined manageability in a compact form factor, the SRX400 helps prevent remote sites from becoming the weak link in an organization’s security posture.
Hybrid mesh updates enable enterprise-level governance of AI use
More than half of organizations are using AI, creating a new challenge: enabling productivity while reducing the risk of accidental access or sharing of sensitive data. HPE’s latest hybrid mesh firewall enhancements introduce features that help organizations govern AI usage with confidence by improving visibility and policy control across distributed environments—without forcing a blanket block on new tools. Key capabilities include:
- Visibility and access controls for AI sites and applications: New controls give organizations at-a-glance insight into AI application usage, one-click access restriction, and proactive blocking of unauthorized or high-risk AI websites.
- Prompt inspection: To prevent data loss, security teams can now deploy prompt inspection, filter keywords and manage file uploads to external AI tools while still allowing productive access to approved applications.
- Centralized identity-based protection: These features create a unified security framework across physical, virtual and containerized environments, ensuring policies follow the user and workload—not just the device.
- AI-driven operations: HPE Security Director simplifies security operations by automating complex workflows and aligning them with industry best practices. Enhanced chatbot capabilities deliver step-by-step assistance and on-demand configuration guidance beyond basic troubleshooting.
Built-in protection for higher-risk environments
By extending resilience-focused security enhancements across HPE’s product portfolio—designed for sovereign use cases—organizations can protect critical workloads, recover faster and maintain operations amid escalating threats:
- Workload and recovery resilience: HPE is improving cyber and disaster recovery for virtualized and cloud workloads in HPE Zerto Software with expanded platform support, new recovery runbooks, broader enablement for AI and AI-related workloads (including vGPU) and Microsoft Defender integration. Secure direct access to immutable HPE StoreOnce data for malware scanning and cyber forensics also accelerates real recovery to known-clean states.
- Confidential compute: HPE extends its sovereign security foundation by integrating confidential computing into HPE Morpheus Software. Using hardware-based trusted execution environments from AMD and Intel and centralized key management with Thales CipherTrust, HPE keeps data encrypted even while in use, helping organizations protect sensitive workloads and meet sovereignty and regulatory requirements in hybrid and air-gapped environments.
- Post-quantum readiness: To address the future challenge quantum computing poses to today’s encryption, HPE added post-quantum cryptography (PQC)-ready features to Junos OS Evolved and will broadly expand PQC support to Junos in summer 2026. These updates align with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standards and will include upgraded cryptographic libraries supporting FIPS 203/204, FIPS 204-based software signing and a Quantum Buffer for SSH. This builds on HPE’s broader PQC preparedness across the portfolio, including HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers with HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) 7.
As organizations continue to adopt sovereign IT infrastructure, these security solutions aim to deliver comprehensive control, compliance and protection—even in constrained environments.
Enhanced threat intelligence with HPE Threat Labs
To help organizations stay ahead of rapidly evolving cyber threats, HPE is expanding HPE Threat Labs, its research-driven threat intelligence team, by integrating additional network telemetry and specialized expertise to deliver real-time insights into AI-driven threats. These capabilities are designed to speed the conversion of threat intelligence into actionable defenses and support the industry’s move toward self-driving security architectures rooted in zero trust.
HPE will showcase these innovations at its booth during RSA Conference 2026, March 23–26, at Moscone Center, South Hall, booth #1255.
Availability
- HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 Series firewalls and the new AI-governance features for the hybrid mesh firewall will be available in Q2 2026.
- HPE Zerto Software 10 U9 is expected to be available in April, and HPE StoreOnce OS 5.2 is available now.
- Confidential compute in HPE Morpheus Software will be available in Q3 2026.
- New post-quantum cryptography features in HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO 7) will be available in summer 2026.