HP Commercial PC Security Strategy

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that HP is big in the printer game and have taken some extreme security measures to protect the corporate print environment. What may surprise to you is how big they are in the PC market as well. According to their numbers, they are #1 in Commercial PC by 7 points and #1 in Consumer PC by 9 points. Things are looking up and in the past few years their Envy line has really taken off.

HP’s main mobile PC offerings are in three separate brands for two distinct markets. On the consumer side of things, the Pavilion is aimed at entry-level customers while the Envy series is marketed toward mainstream and power users. The Spectre and Omen product lines have their sights site set squarely on the enthusiast and power-user crowd. On the commercial side of things, the Pro series is the starting point, followed by the Elite Premium series. At the top of the food chain is the Z Performance series.

They recently showcased the EliteBook 1040 G4 as this ultra-slim machine supports quad-core Intel CPUs – while many other ultra-slim machines are limited to dual-core Intel solutions. RAM, Audio, screen brightness and every other feature on this machine is high-end, and things get even more interesting from there.

As HP was touting their security prowess, they switched gears from merely talking specifications to talking about Sure View Gen 2. This is a built-in privacy screen feature that can be toggled instead of merely glued to the front of your screen like other 3rd party solutions. The panel is proprietary to HP and features 120Hz refresh rate, fantastic brightness and the Sure View 2 will work on both touch and non-touch displays.

That takes care of “Visual Hacking” but there are many ways to compromise data other than by looking over someone’s shoulder. The new commercial HP devices also come with Sure Click that opens links from emails in a virtual sandbox, so that potential threats are separate from the main OS and can be easily destroyed. Sure Recover is their recovery software that helps you get back up and running quickly should hardware fail, or should you get infected by something that gets around Sure Click or Sure Start.

HP is a device company, but even they feel that the sheer number of devices is getting out of control. The fact is that security needs to start at the device level and they are doing their best to provide solutions to help slow down the growing number of data breaches (1,700 in 2016 alone) and reduce the catastrophic loss due to cybercrime (estimated $6 trillion by 2021).

91% of people are concerned with PC security, but most solutions are merely software based and there isn’t a hardware level of detection and control. 77% of people are concerned with mobile data loss, but that usually translates to rogue apps and losing the actual device. Server security is also a high concern, but most people aren’t talking about printers or the plethora of IoT devices.

HP’s security stack is robust and getting larger. There will be new hardware/software combinations coming soon which will better protect your HP devices at the hardware, boot-up level better than ever before. Until all companies are proactive, the threats will continue to leave a path of destruction, but HP leading the way in the battle to minimize the devastation. In the meantime, read published security bulletins, patch your software and take the advice of WeeklyTechUpdate, be sure to backup your data.

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