hytrust

HyTrust Names Mercy Caprara CFO

June 29, 2011 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

HyTrust, which delivers proactive control, compliance and visibility over virtualized environments and the entire cloud stack, has announced that it has named Mercy Caprara as Chief Financial Officer. Caprara will be responsible for driving and overseeing financial strategy and planning at HyTrust.

Caprara has over fifteen years experience in corporate finance, working with both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies. Most recently, she served as VP of Finance, CFO and company secretary of TriCipher, an Internet identity services provider that was recently acquired by VMware.

Prior to that, she was co-founder and VP of Finance for Escalate, a provider of cross-channel commerce solutions, where she set up all finance functions and led several financings.

Before Escalate, Caprara was corporate controller at data warehousing software provider Red Brick Systems (acquired by Informix Software), and Controller for Kiva Software, where she was instrumental in closing the acquisition of that company by Netscape.

“I’m excited to join HyTrust and build upon its existing financial foundation to further the business goals,” noted Mercy Caprara, CFO of HyTrust.

HyTrust Partners With EMC’s RSA To Help Enable Visibility and Compliance in Virtual Infrastructure

September 1, 2010 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

HyTrust today announced it has added interoperability with the RSA enVision platform, a leading 3-in-1 log management solution for Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) from RSA, The Security Division of EMC.

The combination of the HyTrust Appliance and RSA enVision platform puts powerful controls into the hands of joint customers, helping to enable them to confidently virtualize more workloads, satisfy compliance requirements and implement a cloud-based service model.

HyTrust Appliance provides a central point of control for compliance, access control and policy management for virtual infrastructure. It enables virtual environments to be as secure and operationally-ready as physical environments. HyTrust Appliance allows a broader adoption of virtualization, along with all the business and technological benefits that it brings.

By enabling separation of duty, restricted delegation and self-service, HyTrust allows organizations to adopt virtualization and cloud computing for their information technology needs.

The RSA enVision platform is designed to give organizations a single, integrated 3-in-1 log management solution for Security Information and Event Management to help simplify compliance; enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations and risk mitigation; and optimize IT and network operations. The RSA enVision platform is engineered to provide automated collection, analysis, alerting, auditing, reporting and storage of IT log data.

Release: HyTrust Appliance Community Edition

May 7, 2009 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

HyTrust recently announced the availability of HyTrust Appliance Community Edition, a free product that delivers a central point of control for management and visibility of virtualized environments. HyTrust Appliance Community Edition features the same functionality, features, and benefits as the company’s Enterprise Edition but is limited to three protected hypervisor hosts. HyTrust also announced that it has built and made available a new online community to support this strategic vision and provide a central repository for sharing information, gathering feedback and fostering interaction among community members.One of the key drivers behind Community Edition is to enable small and medium businesses to cost-effectively gain the same features and benefits for their virtualized environments as their counterparts in the largest enterprises.

In addition to serving the needs of the SMB market, HyTrust aims to build a community of professionals who are committed to growing the reach of cloud-based computing services and expanding the use of virtualization throughout their organizations. Community Edition enables large enterprises to quickly and easily evaluate HyTrust Appliance capabilities in their environments. Most importantly, HyTrust is now able to widely disseminate its product and gain valuable insight directly via Community feedback. This will lead to more rapid product development and innovation, allowing HyTrust to respond quickly to an already dynamic and rapidly changing marketplace.

HyTrust Appliance Community Edition is now available for download as a pre-built, VMware-compatible virtual appliance to members of HyTrust Community.

Virtualization Security Startup HyTrust Launches With $5.5 Million In Series A Funding

April 8, 2009 by Toon Vanagt Leave a Comment

HyTrust is entering the virtualization arena today with HyTrust Appliance, which serves as a central point of control, management and visibility for virtualized environments. The company also announced it’s launching with venture capital backing to the tune of $5.5 million, a Series A funding round which was led by Trident Capital and joined by Epic Ventures.

VirtSec nowadays is less about those familiar ‘pure’ security functions like FireWalls (FW) or Intrusion Detection (IDS), but much more about the configuration control and compliance of virtualized environments. HyTrust claims to provide such centralized control, compliance,directory integration and security – requirements that become mission critical as virtual infrastructures scale up and production applications get virtualized. Readers of this blog, probably already know that in addition to immediate cost savings, virtualization enables a more flexible and dynamic infrastructure that can quickly morph to meet changing needs of any organization.

The fresh HyTrust single point of control seems to be competing with Reflex Virtualization Management Center (VMC), Third Brigade Deep Security and an established suite of products from Catbird V-Security such as VMShield, HypervisorShield and VMPolicyCompliance. However during our interview with Eric Chiu (CEO HyTrust), he was confident that HyTrust is different by “really focusing on the underlying virtual infrastructure itself. HyTrust authenticates traffic across 5 VMware application interfaces and centrally enforces policies through role based access control. HyTrust single point of control and hypervisor security really ensures what is allowed to happen and what not.” Questioned on the introduction of a yet another single point of failure or potential security flaw, Chiu was confident that HyTrust “is even more secure than VMware vCenter, since our appliance runs on a hardened Linux OS, without command line interface and its use is strictly limited to the provided User Interface.” It goes without saying that known malicious penetration attempts, scans and probes were tested too. Apart form the current exclusive support for VMware ESX, Chiu confirmed to Simon Crosby they would come up with support for Citrix XenServer and also Microsoft Hyper-V later this year. “Our go-to-market strategy started with the VMWare enterprise datacenter customers, but we are already in talk with 3 leading Vmware cloud providers.” When it comes to cloud computing, Chiu sees 2 main scenario’s. First the ‘internal cloud’-approach (aka located in-house, owned & internally managed by an organization), where HyTrust can provide a purpose built lasso around such corporate cloud environment. The second approach involves external cloud providers (located off-premise & managed by a third party provider) and could still make customers achieve compliance in an easy way by implementing Hytrust as a virtual appliance into that cloud offering.

Due to significantly higher rate of change in virtual infrastructure, automated controls are necessary to ensure that security and operational readiness is on par with that of physical environments. In addition, given the spread of virtualization, companies are now being faced with meeting regulatory compliance of their virtual infrastructure. HyTrust allows enterprises to meet these needs and answer the demands of auditors and their solution was created to proactively address the new challenges presented.

Rather than retroactively building necessary safeguards while sensitive data is put at risk, HyTrust, which has three patents pending, allows organizations to build a manageable virtual infrastructure foundation from the ground up. Additionally, to comply with regulations or security standards such as HIPAA, SOX and PCI/DSS, HyTrust gives enterprises the ability to demonstrate that adequate processes and enforcement controls are in place, configuration changes are consistent, and confidential information is secure. The HyTrust Appliance is the only product that addresses virtualization infrastructure control, including all four requirements outlined.

Backed by positive reactions from 12 trial customers, Eric Chiu is confident that he has gotten ‘at the right place, at the right time with the right solution’.

Pricing for the HyTrust Appliance (Enterprise Edition) is based on the number of protected VMware ESX hosts (on a per CPU/socket basis) and HyTrust Appliance license. Protection license for a 2 CPU VMware ESX host is $1,000; the HyTrust virtual appliance is $3,000; and the physical appliance is $7,500. Maintenance and support is charged on 25% of the annual license basis. HyTrust will soon make available the new HyTrust Appliance: Community Edition —a free virtual appliance available for download via the Web. Due out at the end of April, Community will allow protection for up to 3 hosts and offers an excellent way for smaller companies to bring automated virtualization best practices into their environments. HyTrust launched with a direct customer approach, but was already contacted by integrators and resellers eager to distribute licenses. Hytrust is expected to develop such hybrid distribution model in the third quarter of 2009.

Next to its venture capital investors, HyTrust is launching with an impressive list of technology partners, including VMware, Symantec, Cisco Systems and Citrix Systems.