[February 26, 2013]

HyTrust Wins Major Patents For Automated Cloud Security and Virtual Infrastructure Management

FROM THE RSA (News - Alert) CONFERENCE-HyTrust^®, the leader in policy management and access control for virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced that it has been awarded three separate patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in the area of virtualization infrastructure security. The new HyTrust patent portfolio features foundational technologies that greatly automate risk mitigation and compliance in virtualized infrastructure, and ease the adoption of multi-tenant clouds. While each technology offers particular benefits, the entire portfolio delivers the highest value when used in combination to help create automated security in virtualized data centers and cloud environments.

"Our primary mandate at HyTrust is to solve real-world problems for private and public sector organizations running massive multi-tenant clouds and more, and we're gratified that our efforts have been rewarded in this critical field," said Eric Chiu, president and founder, HyTrust. "As demand for optimal cloud security, control, management and compliance continues to rise, these patents further demonstrate that our solutions portfolio offers the best option for automating and securing cloud operations while cutting administrative costs and reducing the potential for errors."

The three patents awarded recently to HyTrust are:

• Methods and Systems for Securely Managing Virtualization Platform
• Adaptive Configuration Management System
• Intelligent Security Control System for Virtualized Ecosystems

The first patent represents the basis for HyTrust's ground-breaking solution, HyTrust Appliance (HTA), which enables optimized virtualization with an enhanced return on investment (ROI). HTA automates numerous virtualized infrastructure security and compliance functions, particularly centralized access control and log reporting, the detection of host configuration errors, and workflow for one-time permissions.

The second patent, which covers Adaptive Configuration, builds on the benefits enabled by the first, using collective data and automation to shrink the ongoing cost of maintaining the safe configuration of hypervisors and other resources, such as virtual networks. It determines and recommends configuration changes (just as an individual's connections in a social network provide knowledge and recommendations that help make a decision). Adaptive Configuration also monitors the state of hypervisors and resources across the virtualization environment, analyzes the results, and recommends configuration changes based on emergent benchmarks, best practices, or established policy. Recommended changes can be automatically implemented throughout the environment, or implemented after administrator approval. The technology then monitors the results of the implemented recommendations and other changes in the environment, and makes iterative configuration recommendations that help keep virtualized resources secure and in compliance.

Finally, the Intelligent Security Control System (ISCS) covered in the third patent magnifies the financial benefits of essentially 'self-securing' virtualized data centers and clouds. It automatically discovers and categorizes the metadata, behavior, and administrator-defined security controls for various types of virtualized services and resources in real time. It then applies similar controls to all virtualized services and resources in a large data center or cloud. For example, ISCS technology could be used to determine the administrative privileges granted to groups in Active Directory, and automatically apply the relevant ones to privileged user roles in the virtualized environment. It could also automatically apply an enterprise's PCI (News - Alert)-based policy to all Virtual Machines it identifies processing credit card information.

"The ultimate draw of virtualized infrastructure has always been that it offers greater efficiencies, flexibility and adaptability than traditional data centers, while reducing the resource allocation and costs associated with management and operations," said Jeff Byrne, Senior Analyst with Taneja Group. "HyTrust's portfolio of patented technologies and solution set goes much further than any other security control or management offering in realizing that potential."

About HyTrust (www.hytrust.com)
Cloud Under Control^™

HyTrust^®, headquartered in Mountain View, CA (News - Alert), is the leader in policy management and access control for virtual infrastructure. HyTrust empowers organizations to virtualize more-including servers that may be subject to compliance-by delivering enterprise-class controls for access, accountability, and visibility to their existing virtualization infrastructure. The Company is backed by top tier investors Granite Ventures, Cisco Systems, VMware, Trident Capital, and Epic Ventures; its partners include VMware; VCE; Symantec; CA; McAfee; Splunk; HP Arcsight; Accuvant; RSA and Intel Corporation.

HyTrust; HyTrust, Inc.; HyTrust Appliance; HyTrust Appliance Community Edition; HyTrust Cloud Control; "Virtualization Under Control"; "Cloud Under Control" and "Virtualization and Cloud Under Control" are all trademarks of HyTrust, Inc. All other names and trademarks are property of their respective firms.

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