Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) rolled out a slate of security updates to help enterprises manage the growing risks tied to distributed AI deployments, introducing new firewalls, expanded hybrid mesh protections, and resilience-focused enhancements across its portfolio.

The updates include the HPE Juniper Networking SRX400 Series line of firewalls designed to extend enterprise-grade security into smaller, distributed sites.

HPE said the SRX400 series standardizes protections from core to edge with hardware-rooted safeguards and centralized policy enforcement. The goal is to ensure that as enterprises scale AI use cases, they don’t introduce fragmented or uneven security controls across environments.

Alongside the hardware, HPE is expanding its hybrid-mesh firewall architecture to address a newer challenge: governing how employees and systems interact with AI tools. HPE noted that more than half of organizations are already using AI internally, raising concerns about data leakage through prompts, file uploads, and unauthorized applications.

To address this, HPE introduced several new capabilities. These include AI application visibility and access controls, allowing IT teams to monitor and restrict usage of AI tools; prompt-level inspection, which can filter and manage data that could be shared when using AI tools; and Identity-based policy enforcement, ensuring security follows users and workloads across environments.

Rather than blocking AI tools outright, HPE says these features are a way to balance their emerging use cases with governance.

The company is also leaning into automation, integrating AI-driven operations into its Security Director platform, which now includes chatbot-based assistance for configuration and troubleshooting.

HPE also introduced updates across its infrastructure stack aimed at improving resilience in high-risk environments. Those include enhancements to HPE Zerto for disaster recovery; expanded confidential computing capabilities to keep data encrypted even during processing; and new post-quantum cryptography (PQC) features designed to prepare for future threats posed by quantum computing.

HPE is also expanding its Threat Labs capabilities, adding more telemetry and AI-driven analysis to help organizations detect and respond to emerging threats.