HyTrust acquires HighCloud Security

HyTrust Inc. has acquired HighCloud Security, a leader in cloud encryption and key management software. By combining HyTrust’s powerful administrative visibility and control with HighCloud’s strengths in encryption and key management, the acquisition offers customers of both companies an unprecedented level of flexibility in addressing security, compliance and data privacy requirements in all cloud environments—private, public and hybrid.

“With the increasing prevalence of data breaches, leaks of classified information by insiders, and surveillance in the cloud, data security and privacy are more important than perhaps ever before,” said HyTrust CEO John De Santis. “Cloud computing in all its forms has become the top technology priority for every enterprise, and that’s why we’ve quadrupled our growth at HyTrust in just the past year. By bringing HighCloud Security’s market-leading technologies into the HyTrust family of solutions, we can take to market the strongest protection for virtualized cloud infrastructure available anywhere.”

The combined offering from HyTrust and HighCloud enables ‘cloaked’ private, hybrid and public clouds and helps address three of the primary security concerns in cloud environments. These are:
· The broad level of access available to privileged users with malicious intent (or those who acquire their credentials)
· 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

While these issues don’t always get the attention they deserve, security executives are certainly aware of the concerns that stem from in-house misuse. A recent report1 from Forrester Research notes that insiders rather than extraneous criminal elements were the top source of breaches in the past 12 months, and 36% of them were caused not by malfeasance but by inadvertent misuse of data by employees.

In this environment, HyTrust and HighCloud Security offer unique and complementary strengths to the market.
Eric Chiu, president and founder of HyTrust, said: “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. HighCloud encryption, meanwhile, can be deployed in private, hybrid and public clouds, ensuring data security and privacy as organizations migrate between these environments.”
Cloud computing, and the security concerns that go with it, remain a top priority for most organizations. According to technology analyst firm Gartner Inc., nearly half of large enterprises have deployed a private cloud service and three-fourths expect to have hybrid cloud deployments by 2015.2 A full 80% of organizations intend to use cloud services in some form within the next year, while 60% plan to increase their investment in the next two to five years.

Chiu continued: “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. 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, the HighCloud solution will in the future 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. HighCloud’s engineering team will join HyTrust, continuing to provide support and maintenance to existing customers, and moving forward with the development of HighCloud’s technology roadmap.

"HighCloud and HyTrust have had many ties over the years and solve complementary problems for customers," said Bill Hackenberger, co-founder, president and CEO of HighCloud Security. "Together, HyTrust and HighCloud give enterprises unprecedented ability to address security, compliance and data privacy requirements for all cloud environments, private, hybrid and public."