Businesses need smarter tools to battle today’s wide ranging and fast-evolving IT security threats, which is the reason Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has added a company called Niara to its arsenal.
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Announced Wednesday, the acquisition is aimed at boosting HPE’s existing security portfolio with new tools based on user and entity behavior analytics. Niara’s technology works by analyzing the typical behavior of individual users across an enterprise, and then watching for any activity that differs from the norm.
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HPE did not disclose the terms of the transaction. The company said Niara will operate as part of HPE Aruba, the business division formed when HPE acquired Aruba Networks in 2015.
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The Niara acquisition is also a reunion of sorts, as Niara’s co-founders, CEO Sriram Ramachandran and vice president of engineering Prasad Palkar, are Aruba veterans, as are several other Niara engineers who will now be joining HPE.
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Needed a ‘Threat Hunting Tool’
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We needed a more proactive approach to hunting for threats that may have already entered the network and shutting them down with enforcement tools, HPE Aruba senior vice president and general manager Keerti Melkote said in a blog post. We needed a threat hunting tool that would be more proactive in surfacing potential threats on the network.
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Melkote, who co-founded Aruba Networks in 2002, added, Niara’s value proposition resonated strongly with me, as it does with many of their customers, and I am eager to share this best-in-class technology with our HPE Aruba customers.
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While Aruba’s ClearPass Policy Manager lets businesses set user privileges to help with security enforcement, Niara’s technology relies on behavioral analytics to keep track of user activity and watch for anomalies. The company’s solution watches and analyzes packet streams, then compares those to the behavioral baseline it established for each user to see if anything out of…