Fresh off of news that it had raised $18.5 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round in late August, HyTrust, a provider of policy management and access control solutions for virtual and cloud environments, announced that it has acquired HighCloud Security, a provider of cloud encryption and key management software.
According to HyTrust, the combined technologies from HyTrust and HighCloud enable ‘cloaked’ private, hybrid and public clouds and help address three of the primary security concerns in cloud environments.
· The broad level of access available to privileged users with malicious intent
· Breaches and other data center disasters caused not by criminal intent but through human error or misconfiguration
· Challenges involved in maintaining the security and privacy of the data itself
“HyTrust represents the control point for cloud management, providing automated policy-based security for private cloud environments that can enable both trusted hybrid clouds and ‘cloaked’ public clouds,” said Eric Chiu, president and founder of HyTrust. “HighCloud encryption, meanwhile, can be deployed in private, hybrid and public clouds, ensuring data security and privacy as organizations migrate between these environments.”
“The service also enables a unique level of ‘walk-way’ freedom by making it possible to securely change cloud providers or decommission from the cloud without having to worry about data being left behind,” Chiu added. “This also makes it easier for corporations to achieve compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and PCI.”
While the technologies can already be used together, HighCloud’s technology will be integrated into HyTrust to more tightly bind administrative controls with data security in cloud environments, making encryption and key management invisible to the end user.
Organizations use HyTrust’s technology to reduce the risks in virtualized cloud environments by ensuring that security policies are automated, applied correctly and enforced. In October 2012, the company added a “secondary approval” feature to its HyTrust Appliance that enforces the “two-person rule”, made famous by the US Air Force’s general rule focusing on nuclear missile launches.
“HyTrust sits at the center of an important IT ecosystem, providing the control, security configuration, compliance assurance and visibility needed to reap the benefits of the cloud,” Wayne Pauley, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group said in a statement. “ With HighCloud, HyTrust adds strong, cloud-optimized data security to its portfolio – a critical requirement for data protection and compliance. And customers gain improved security for data at rest – enabling the same level of visibility in the new virtual datacenter as its physical counterparts.”
HighCloud’s engineering team will join HyTrust and continue to provide support and maintenance to existing customers, the company said.
Investors in HyTrust include Intel Capital, Fortinet, VMware, In-Q-Tel, Granite Ventures, Cisco, Trident Capital and Epic Ventures.
Read SecurityWeek’s interview with HyTrust President and Co-Founder Eric Chiu