To help enterprises securely adopt AI and turn resilience into a core business capability, HPE is introducing the HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 Series Firewalls, an expanded hybrid mesh security architecture, and resilience-centered enhancements to extend consistent protection across cloud, core, and edge environments.
“In the AI era, security can no longer be bolted on or managed in isolation. As AI workloads scale across distributed sites, networking and security must be deeply integrated to reduce risk, enhance visibility, and deliver the trust enterprises require,” said David Hughes, SVP & GM, SASE and Security for Networking, HPE. “HPE helps customers standardize policy and consistently enforce it across distributed environments so they can adopt AI with confidence while preserving performance, resiliency, manageability, and control.”
Bringing carrier-grade security to the edge
Integral security is a core component of the HPE self-driving network, pairing autonomous, AI-native operations with built-in zero trust, shared visibility, and end-to-end policy enforcement so networks can optimize, self-heal, and protect themselves at machine speed. As AI use expands into stores, clinics, campuses, and branches, these distributed sites increasingly become the front line for unmanaged AI access, inconsistent policy enforcement, and new paths for data exposure.
The HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 series extends carrier-grade security efficacy into smaller sites and space-constrained environments, supporting a standardized security posture from core to edge, with hardware-rooted protections that help defend against tampering and establish trusted device integrity. With high performance and streamlined manageability in a compact footprint, the SRX400 helps safeguard remote sites from becoming the weak link in an organization’s security strategy.
Hybrid mesh updates bring enterprise-grade governance to AI usage
More than half of organizations are using AI within their organizations, creating a new challenge: enabling productivity while reducing the risk of sensitive data being accessed or shared unintentionally. HPE’s latest hybrid mesh firewall enhancements introduce new capabilities that help organizations govern AI usage with confidence by improving visibility and policy control across distributed environments without forcing a blockade against emerging tools. Key capabilities include:
● Visibility and access management for AI websites and applications: New controls allow organizations to gain full visibility into AI application usage at a glance, restrict access with a single click, and proactively block access to unauthorized or high-risk AI websites.
● Prompt-level inspection: To prevent data loss, security teams can now implement prompt-level inspection, filtering keywords and managing file uploads to external AI tools while still allowing productive access to approved applications.
● Centralized identity-based protection: These capabilities provide a unified security fabric across all environments—physical, virtual, and containerized—ensuring that security policies follow the user and the workload, not just the device.
● AI-native operations: HPE Security Director simplifies security operations by automating complex security workflows to align with industry best practices. Enhanced chatbot capabilities enable customers to move beyond basic troubleshooting with step-by-step assistance and on-demand configuration guidance.
Built-in security for higher-stakes threat environments
By extending sovereign-ready security and resilience-centered enhancements across the HPE product portfolio, organizations can protect critical workloads, recover faster, and sustain operations under escalating threat conditions:
● Workload and recovery resilience: HPE is enhancing cyber and disaster recovery for virtualized and cloud workloads in HPE Zerto Software with enriched platform support, new recovery runbooks, broader enablement for AI and AI-related workloads (including vGPU), and Microsoft Defender integration. Secure direct access to immutable HPE StoreOnce data for malware scanning and cyber forensics also accelerates real-world recovery to known clean states.
● Confidential computing: HPE is extending its sovereign-ready security foundation with confidential computing integrated into HPE Morpheus Software. Using hardware-based trusted execution environments from AMD and Intel and centralized key management with Thales CipherTrust, HPE keeps data encrypted even while in use, helping organizations protect sensitive workloads and meet sovereignty and regulatory requirements across hybrid and air-gapped environments.
● Post-quantum readiness: To address the anticipated challenge that quantum computing will present to today’s encryption, HPE has added post-quantum cryptography (PQC)-ready capabilities to Junos OS Evolved and will extend PQC support more broadly to Junos in summer 2026. These updates align with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliance standards and will include upgraded cryptographic libraries supporting FIPS 203/204, FIPS 204–based software signing, and Quantum Buffer for SSH. This update builds on HPE’s broader PQC readiness across the portfolio, including HPE ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers with HPE Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) 7.
As organizations continue to embrace sovereign IT infrastructure, these security solutions are designed to provide comprehensive control, compliance, and protection, even in air-gapped environments.
Enhanced threat intelligence with HPE Threat Labs
To help organizations stay ahead of rapidly evolving cyber threats, HPE is expanding HPE Threat Labs, its research-driven threat intelligence group, by incorporating additional networking telemetry and expertise to deliver real-time, AI-native threat insights. These capabilities are designed to convert threat intelligence into action faster by identifying emerging threats, supporting the industry’s shift toward self-driving, zero trust security architectures.
