HyTrust buys HighCloud for maximum strength security

Businesses looking to increase the level of flexibility available to them for addressing security, compliance and data privacy requirements in all cloud environments – be they private, public or hybrid – may find themselves interested in the coming together of HyTrust Inc and HighCloud Security.

With its acquisition of HighCloud Security, HyTrust is adding that company’s cloud encryption and key management software with its own administrative visibility and control tools. The combined offering enables ‘cloaked’ private, hybrid and public clouds, and helps address three of the primary security concerns in cloud environments.

These, the company suggests, are the broad level of access available to privileged users with malicious intent (or those who acquire their credentials), breaches and other datacentre disasters caused not by criminal intent but through human error or misconfiguration. And the 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 Forrester Research report indicated insiders rather than extraneous criminal elements were the top source of breaches in the past 12 months. Some 36 percent of them were caused not by malfeasance but by inadvertent misuse of data by employees.

 “Security and data privacy are paramount for our customers, especially those with compliance requirements. The combined strengths of HyTrust and HighCloud technologies make this a truly compelling solution that helps us mitigate customer concerns and expand our offering to more security-sensitive customers.”

“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. By bringing HighCloud Security’s market-leading technologies into the HyTrust family of solutions, we can take to market the strongest protection for virtualised cloud infrastructure available anywhere.”

Cloud computing, and the security concerns that go with it, remain a top priority for most organisations. According to technology analyst firm Gartner, nearly half of large enterprises have deployed a private cloud service and three-fourths expect to have hybrid cloud deployments by 2015. In addition, 80 percent of organisations intend to use cloud services in some form within the next year, while 60 percent plan to increase their investment in the next two to five years.

“The serviceenables 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,” said Eric Chiu, president and founder of HyTrust. “This also makes it easier for corporations to achieve compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and PCI. 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.”

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.