We have written before about HyTrust and its growing ecosystem of partners, but now HyTrust has acquired HighCloud Security, a provider of encryption and key management for the virtual and IaaS environments. HyTrust provides control and visibility into actions by virtualization administrators within a VMware vSphere or vCloud environment. With the acquisition of HighCloud Security, HyTrust now adds data privacy to its suite of tools. Initially, HighCloud Security’s encryption and key management will be separate products, but there are many ways in which the technologies can be combined. The purchase changes HyTrust’s unique stance in the industry.
TVP Strategy Archives
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an analyst, author, architect, technologist, and out-of-the-box thinker. As an analyst, Edward looks at all things IoT, big data, cloud, security, and DevOps. As an author, he has written about virtualization and security. As an architect, Edward creates peer-reviewed reference architectures for hybrid cloud, cloud-native applications, and many other aspects of the modern business. As a technologist, Edward creates code prototypes for parts of those architectures. Edward is solving today’s problems in an implementable fashion.
Data Protection: The Future
Data protection of the future: What will it look like? Will we have huge amounts of storage in just one place, or will we have myriad data everywhere? The more copies the better, for example? Or are we moving toward a combination of the two? Can what we are doing today actually be used for data protection in the future? Think about how hybrid clouds are used today: do they grant us new forms of data protection?
Picking a Secure Hybrid Cloud Security Solution
In the past we have discussed the various aspects of the secure hybrid cloud, ranging from the data center through a transition stage and finally to and from the cloud. Unfortunately, picking just one security solution, or even one family of solutions, does not work, so we need to start thinking outside the box and pick the best based on our needs, which cover compliance as well as security. So how do we pick a security solution based on our needs?
Hybrid Cloud Security Is Bastionless (or "Who Moved My Moat!")
When we look at the Secure Hybrid Cloud, we notice a few things immediately, such as the need to look at how the data is moving, where the users are going, and the fact that they may never touch the data center component of the cloud at all. Our worldview has to change to be more user-, app-, and data-centric. Hybrid cloud security fails if we continue to consider our data center protections enough, as the bastions have moved and we may not know how that happened.
Virtual Networking Is Not Network Virtualization
While SPB is a very interesting protocol, my questions were about how deep into the virtual environment the protocol extends. While SPB and other networking protocols are considered by some to be network virtualization, I could not see this within the realm of the virtual network and hence, confusion reigned supreme. Depending on who is talking to each other, the same words can mean many different things. What I found amazing, still, is that most people thinks networking ends at the physical NIC within the virtualization host, and that what is inside, does not matter as much as what is outside.
HyTrust Expanding Role in Secure Hybrid Cloud
HyTrust released their version 3.5 of their virtualization security proxy and compliance tool. This tool is core to a growing ecosystem of partners and systems. HyTrust has also expanded its role within the Secure Hybrid Cloud by covering more of what is traditionally part of the data center. HyTrust is a proxy that sits between an administrator and sensitive systems by providing advanced role based access controls but also advanced logging. With HyTrust fronting your VMware vSphere environment, HP ILO, Cisco UCS UIM, Nexus Switches, administrators gain a fine grain level of control over actions, improved logging in these environments, and the ability to vault critical passwords.