[September 07, 2012]

Gazzang Appoints Dustin Kirkland as Chief Technology Officer

Gazzang today announced the promotion of Dustin Kirkland to the role of chief technology officer. Kirkland is now responsible for the technical vision, competitive strategy and product roadmap of the enterprise security startup.

Kirkland formerly held the title of chief architect and was responsible for the design and development of Gazzang products, including the recently launched zTrustee™, an opaque object store for securing and managing cryptographic keys, certificates, tokens and other sensitive bits of IT DNA.

Kirkland is an open source industry expert with more than 10 years of experience developing and deploying Linux and other open source-related solutions. He is a co-author of eCryptfs, an enterprise-class, stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux, and also constructed Ubuntu's (News - Alert) unique home directory encryption feature on top of eCryptfs - a model that was replicated by Google within its ChromeOS devices.

"Big data, cloud computing and the consolidation of IT into remote service offerings are placing a heavy burden on IT security, which is tasked with protecting corporate data while maintaining performance, compliance and high availability," said Kirkland. "Gazzang is focused on helping enterprises secure sensitive data and other IT objects in the cloud, and I look forward to working closely with our customers and partners to bring innovative solutions to market that address those challenges."

Prior to Gazzang, Kirkland was a cloud architect at Canonical, where he was instrumental in bringing infrastructure-as-a-service (OpenStack, Eucalyptus) and platform-as-a-service (CloudFoundry) open source solutions into Ubuntu. He also designed and led the team that implemented Ubuntu Orchestra. Kirkland spent nearly eight years at IBM (News - Alert) as a developer and architect in Tivoli, at the Linux Technology Center and with Global Technical Services, and was named an IBM Master Inventor in 2004. He has also founded more than two-dozen open source projects and remains active in twenty of them, including Byobu, aNerd, OverlayRoot, and PowerNap.

"Dustin's deep understanding of big data and open source has helped us create a unique niche in software-based data encryption and key management, drawing accolades from customers, partners, industry analysts and other influencers for product innovation and business impact," said Larry Warnock, CEO of Gazzang. "Dustin's state-of-the-art solutions are helping organizations deploy new data security technologies with less business risk. I'm thrilled to have him shape and lead our aggressive solutions strategy."

About Gazzang

Gazzang provides data security solutions and operational diagnostics that help enterprises protect sensitive information and maintain performance in cloud environments. The company has over 200 customers across multiple industries including SaaS (News - Alert) providers, financial services, technology, health care and public sector organizations. Gazzang is backed by Austin Ventures and Silver Creek Ventures. For more information, visit www.gazzang.com.

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