HyTrust, a provider of policy management and access control solutions for virtual and cloud environments, announced that it has raised $18.5 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round.
Investors putting cash into the security firm include new investors Intel Capital and Fortinet as well as recent investors VMware and In-Q-Tel.
The company said the funding would be used to support its growth and operations, mainly in the areas of sales and marketing, as well as support development of its cloud security platform and other technologies.
The company said global sales are on target to quadruple in 2013.
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.
“According to US Air Force Instruction (AFI) 91-104, the two-person rule was designed to prevent the accidental or malicious launch of nuclear weapons by a single individual,” HyTrust President and Co-Founder, Eric Chiu explained previously. “Similarly, HyTrust’s Secondary Approval feature mandates designated approvers authorize high-impact operations prior to users with administration privileges being able to execute actions that can impact the business or even bring down the entire data center.”
“Next-generation datacenters need next-generation security. As organizations seek to avoid security breaches, meet new requirements (such as the NSA’s two-man rule to restrict access to sensitive information) and address audit and risk, they’ll look toward more effective solutions, including role-based monitoring and alerting capabilities, to more quickly and accurately detect and block threats,” Jeff Byrne, Senior Analyst at Taneja Group, explained. “HyTrust’s focus on security and control, combined with growing awareness about these issues, will likely propel the company’s growth in 2013 and beyond.”
“Next-generation data centers will be virtualized, dynamic and multi-tenant. With that, security and compliance has to be automated and policy-based to enable this software-defined data center model,” Michael Xie, Founder and CTO of Fortinet, said in a statement. “HyTrust is at the very core of this movement by enabling policy enforcement and visibility for multi-tenant cloud environments.”
Previous investors Granite Ventures, Cisco, Trident Capital and Epic Ventures also participated in this latest financing round.
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