HyTrust

HyTrust, founded in 2007, established itself as a specialized provider of security and compliance software for virtualized and cloud environments before its acquisition by Entrust in January 2021. The company was founded by Eric Chiu, Renata Budko, Boris Strongin, and Boris Belov. Prior to HyTrust, co-founders Eric Chiu and Renata Budko worked at Cemaphore Systems, a company focused on disaster recovery solutions, which provided them with relevant experience in data protection. HyTrust's business model centered on automating security controls for software-defined computing, networking, and storage workloads. This catered to enterprises, service providers, and government agencies seeking to enhance their security posture in private, public, and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

The company's offerings were designed to provide visibility, granular policy control, and data protection across these complex IT landscapes. HyTrust's core products included CloudControl, DataControl, and KeyControl. CloudControl is a virtual appliance that acts as an intermediary, enforcing security policies for administrative requests within virtual infrastructures and logging all activities for auditing and compliance purposes. DataControl provides encryption for data at rest on virtual machines, ensuring its security until it is actively in use. Complementing this is KeyControl, a key management server (KMS) designed to handle the lifecycle of encryption keys for numerous encrypted workloads across multi-cloud deployments. These solutions supported major cloud platforms such as VMware, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Financially, HyTrust was backed by significant venture capital, raising $5.5 million in its initial round in 2009 from investors including Trident Capital and Epic Ventures. Subsequent funding rounds attracted investments from major technology players like Intel Capital, Cisco, and Fortinet, culminating in a total of $95.5M raised over seven rounds. The company expanded its capabilities through strategic acquisitions, including HighCloud Security in 2013, which added encryption and key management to its portfolio, and DataGravity in 2017. The journey concluded with its acquisition by Entrust, a move intended to integrate HyTrust's management layer for encryption and cloud security policy into Entrust's broader suite of digital security and data protection solutions.

Keywords: cloud security, data encryption, key management, virtualization security, compliance automation, policy enforcement, multi-cloud security, access control, workload protection, security automation