During the RSAC 2025 Conference, HPE announced several smaller and larger security additions to both HPE Aruba Networking and HPE GreenLake. From a network perspective, there is a strong focus on Zero Trust access to networks. For HPE GreenLake, DORA plays an important role in one of the additions.
As an infrastructure player, HPE naturally has a responsibility in the area of security. They play an important role in keeping attackers away from organizations’ data, among other things. HPE Aruba Networking has paid a lot of attention to this over the past year, for example with the introduction of its own NDR solution. HPE GreenLake has focused on this for many years, partly through integrations with its own Zerto offering.
What’s new in HPE Aruba Networking?
Looking at the new security features for HPE Aruba Networking, the policy manager within HPE Aruba Networking Central NAC stands out in particular. NAC stands for Network Access Control and is one of the fundamental security features of a network provider. The news surrounding NAC within HPE Aruba Networking Central is that there is now more granularity around access policy for the entire network. Think of things like application-to-role, role-to-subnet, and role-to-role. HPE expects this to enable more detailed and consistent policies to be implemented on the network.
It is also striking that HPE Aruba Networking is gradually moving towards a SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) offering. Today, it announced closer integration of HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN and HPE Aruba Networking SSE (Security Service Edge). SASE is largely a deep integration of SD-WAN and SSE.
In the field of SSE, HPE Aruba Networking is also announcing new developments in terms of availability and performance. It will offer higher availability and higher performance through meshing. In other words, traffic will be routed between HPE Aruba Networking SSE’s global PoPs (Points of Presence) in a smarter (and secure) way. This not only increases reliability, but also the resilience of this part of the infrastructure.
What’s new in HPE GreenLake?
In an earlier article, we saw that HPE Aruba Networking and HPE GreenLake are converging somewhat in terms of how HPE approaches them. At RSAC 2025, HPE is also making announcements for both environments simultaneously, although there is not yet a lot of really deep integration between the two in terms of announcements.
In our opinion, the most interesting HPE GreenLake feature today is a new way to respond to security threats. HPE calls this threat-adaptive security. This means that an HPE Private Cloud Enterprise environment can temporarily disconnect itself from the internet when a threat is detected. This can be particularly important in the event of data exfiltration attempts, provided that organizations are able to respond in time, of course. It allows them to immediately isolate important data that has not been compromised yet. This new feature is in response to the introduction of DORA, which stipulates security measures for certain organizations.
When it comes to isolating an environment, it is also worth noting that HPE is now making air-gapped management from the cloud available for sovereign HPE Private Cloud Enterprise environments. This makes a cloud experience available to customers in regulated industries, as no connection to an external network is required. There is no need for continued installation validation with an external platform. In the future, it will also be possible to run cloud-native Kubernetes workloads under air-gapped management.
Finally, looking at specific security announcements within HPE GreenLake, HPE Cybersecurity Services for sovereign clouds stands out. This is a service that provides cybersecurity experts who help organizations implement sovereign security solutions. There are also new services related to the adoption of AI that focus specifically on governance, risk management, and compliance. Finally, the integration between HPE GreenLake, OpsRamp (observability), and Crowdstrike (detection) is now generally available.