IT and security leaders find themselves facing an uphill battle to secure employee experience without alienating users who generally view safeguards as a hurdle to productivity. By embracing hardware with in-depth built-in security capabilities and platforms that support zero trust and threat isolation technologies, IT and security organisations can effectively mitigate security risks without degrading enterprise performance.
Honing an employee-friendly security approach is all the more critical as deployment of AI-enabled systems and workflows ramps up. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, found one in five organisations reporting a breach due to shadow AI, with only 37% equipped with policies to manage or detect shadow AI. The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report found that AI-enabled attacks surged 89% over the last year.
“Traditional tools are not keeping up, and it’s only going to be more of an issue,” says Justin Carroz, senior product marketing manager at Wolf Security. “It goes back to building a strong foundation and making sure the right tools are in place to remediate.”
Security without the baggage
HP, in concert with AMD, offers a lineup of security capabilities and technologies that tackle the security challenge without erecting unnecessary barriers for users as well as security teams. The HP security portfolio is designed to help increase IT operational efficiency and availability while enabling users to be more productive — all without the burden of increased risk. For its part, the expansive portfolio of AMD Ryzen™ AI desktop processors leverages the AMD PRO platform to strengthen enterprise-class security, manageability, and resilience for large-scale AI PC deployments.
The following technologies can go a long way in balancing the demands for increased protections with employees’ desire — and need — to work unencumbered by onerous controls:
Hardware-enforced protection: Traditional detection solutions don’t reach down into the firmware layer, but that’s an active target for cyberattackers today. HP commercial PCs, including AMD advanced HP AI PCs, are protected with HP Sure Start, a proprietary hardware-enforced protection and recovery solution for BIOS and other critical firmware components. The HP Endpoint Security Controller Chip lies at the heart of the system, actively preventing unauthorised changes, detecting potential tampering, and orchestrating automated recovery from compromise.
AMD PRO Technologies ushers in advanced hardware features at the chip level, including full memory encryption, capabilities that protect against control flow attacks, and comprehensive support for the Microsoft Pluton secure cryptoprocessor. Together, the multilayered approach provides critical chip-to-cloud safeguards against sophisticated threats.
Hardware-enforced endpoint isolation: Isolating potential risk factors (email attachments or web downloads, for example) in a separate space, enforced by CPU hardware, ensures that anything suspect can’t infect the PC’s operating system or data. These microvirtual machines, essentially a secure, isolated container, ensure that users can keep working without interruption while IT teams benefit from having fewer malware, ransomware, or phishing attack incidents to remediate. Both HP and AMD have architected solutions based on endpoint isolation strategies.
Hardware-enforced embedded recovery: Sometimes an attack is unavoidable, so the work of recovery and increasing resilience must begin. Reimaging can be painful, but with tools such as HP Sure Recover, getting back up and running is less of a burden for users as well as IT. Using the HP Endpoint Security Controller to provide a hardened root of trust, teams can safely reinstall the latest verified OS image with minimal fuss, including scheduling updates or periodically reimaging all computers in the network. Users without technical knowledge can also reimage devices on their own, without having to wait for IT and freeing up IT to do other work.
Having a state-of-the-art security backbone is nonnegotiable in today’s heightened attack climate. But with the right tools and proper planning, IT and security organisations can safeguard the enterprise with only minimal disruption to the business.
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