HP Hauls In Trustgenix

In buying security specialist Trustgenix Inc. Wednesday, Hewlett-Packard is looking to bolster its OpenView storage management software. (See HP to Buy Trustgenix.)

And in that vein, the decision to combine Trustgenixs identity management technology and OpenView makes good sense, especially as HP looks to tighten management across a range of different data center devices. The deal follows the acquisition of storage management specialists AppIQ Inc. and Peregrine Systems Inc. earlier this year. (See HP Chomps AppIQ & Peregrine.)

With new cyber security threats emerging daily, users are scrambling to lock down their storage systems. Controlling who gets access is fast becoming a key part of this effort. (See CERT Says Phishers Get Craftier and Identity Management Heats Up.)

Trustgenix’s flagship offering is IdentityBridge, software that links different identity management systems. The goal here is to remove the need for end-users to re-key passwords and user names as they move across an organization’s different systems.

An IT manager at a West Coast Web hosting company, who asked not to be named, thinks centralized identity management is becoming increasingly important to users. “There’s a tremendous amount of administrative overhead brought with all these different sign-ons,” he says.Potentially, he adds, combining IdentityBridge with a storage management product such as OpenView could make IT managers’ lives much easier. “It makes the environment a lot cleaner and simpler from a user perspective. It makes it a lot easier for a user to integrate and use all the tools that they have.”

With firms’ storage systems relying heavily on partner and supplier IT systems, single sign-on, as it is known, is becoming more and more important. So important, in fact, that HP started cozying up to Trustgenix over a year ago, when it OEM'd IdentityBridge. (See HP Signs Up Security Startup.)

Identity management has become a major headache for IT managers, who are desperate not to see their companies' names plastered across the media due to security breaches. (See ChoicePoint Appoints Independent Exec.) But this area has also been identified as something of a technology black hole. At the last Interop event in Las Vegas, for example, lack of effective identity management products was cited as a major problem by CIOs. (See CIOs Face Identity Crisis.)

But Trustgenix is not the only startup playing in this space. Denver-based Ping Identity Corp. also tackles the problem of single sign-on. Such is the growing importance of identity management that Ping recently joined forces with HP’s arch-rival IBM Corp. (See Ping Identity Joins Forces With IBM.)

Could the marriage of security and storage equal Fort Knox-style data centers? A number of startups clearly think so. Earlier this month, for example, A10 Networks unveiled a device designed to lock down servers and shift security data onto backend storage devices. (See A10 Networks Seeks Identity and A10 Enters IAM Market.) Another startup, Identity Engines, is already planning to extend its identity management offerings to storage systems (See Identity Engines Starts Ignition.)HP’s Trustgenix acquisition is expected to close in 30 days.

— James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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