HyTrust has announced Series B Financing in the amount of $10.5 Million with participation from Cisco, Granite Ventures as well as existing investors Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. This is very good news for HyTrust. While the Series B Funding was not much of a surprise given that HyTrust fits into the Virtualizaiton Security within its own niche. What is surprising is that Cisco is one of the backers of this innovative product.
Cisco’s involvement in virtualization is growing every day. We have seen Cisco announce the Nexus 1000V, Cisco-VMware-EMC, Cisco-VMware-NetApp, as well as Cisco’s continued development of physical switch mechanisms that will eventually replace the virtual switch entirely. Now they are getting involved with HyTrust which acts as a management network security device. Cisco has the PIX firewall and a security elements built directly into their switches. This may appear like a new direction for Cisco, however, I believe this is inline with Cisco’s current involvement in virtualization. Security of virtualization and the cloud is extremely important and Cisco is backing this up with helping to fund HyTrust.
Cisco’s involvement is very good for HyTrust and proves that their product is a necessity within the virtualization security stack.