HP And FireEye Join Breach-Fighting Forces

Under the deal, HP will offer breach incident response, compromise assessment and threat-protection services through its HP Enterprise Services division. FireEye will provide the threat protection services for HP customers, while its recently acquired Mandiant division will do incident response and compromise assessment. The two companies will also develop a standard reference architecture for customers to serve as a security blueprint.

FireEye CEO David DeWalt described the deal to Reuters as “capability meets scale.” HP already has 5,000 of its own security consultants working for its large corporate clients, and those consultants will now be able to bring in FireEye’s technology and Mandiant’s investigators, the companies said.

The deal will bring FireEye’s security services to geographic areas where the company has lower penetration, including Africa, Europe and the Middle East. But it will also bring Mandiant’s pricey services to smaller companies through a version co-branded with HP. In a recent report on breaches, Symantec found that 60 percent of targeted attacks are now aimed at small and medium-size organizations.

Of the three key services that the partnership will offer, the most obvious one for most organizations is Incident Response, in which HP and Mandiant will investigate, assess and resolve cybersecurity events ranging from single-system compromises to enterprise-wide breaches. But the Compromise Assessment service may also be popular among enterprises to determine whether they have been breached or a third-party partner (such as a payments processor) has been attacked. The Threat Protection service will provide continuous monitoring for signs of an attack that has bypassed traditional technology defenses.

HP and FireEye didn’t announce pricing or availability for the security services they’ll jointly offer. They announced the deal at the RSA security conference in San Francisco.