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Data workload security provider HyTrust reported news July 11 on a couple of fronts: It announced the acquisition of security provider DataGravity, then deposited a cool $36 million into the bank thanks to a venture round led by Advance Venture Partners.
There’s nothing like buying a company and then having someone else hand you a nice chunk of change to cover it—on the same day.
HyTrust, based in Mountain View, Calif., made the announcements at a conference in Chicago. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed; several members of the DataGravity team will be joining HyTrust, the company said.
DataGravity automates security policy enforcement for workload data, something that HyTrust needed to add in order to stay ahead of the IT security curve. The acquisition brings new data discovery and classification expertise to HyTrust’s data security solutions, which are focused on protecting workload data—not necessarily access policies.
VC Funding Will Be Invested in Sales, Marketing
The $36 million in new funding will go into expanding the company’s sales and marketing efforts and for new product development and acquisitions, HyTrust executive Eric Chiu told eWEEK.
Privately held HyTrust apparently is in a hot sales streak; the company has been increasing its income by an average of 92 percent over the past three years, Chiu said.
“That puts us in an enviable position in that we’re leading the pack in the workload security space,” Chiu said. “The $36 million in VC lets us expand our sales and marketing; in fact, we see a much bigger market—we’ve only scratched the surface.”
A recent partnership deal with IBM to use HyTrust as an option in the Bluemix (former SoftLayer and soon to become simply IBM Cloud) cloud has been a major factor in HyTrust’s growth the last three years.
The DataGravity acquisition comes at a time of rapid growth in the cloud security solutions market. According to Forrester, the global cloud security solutions market will grow 28 percent annually over the 2017-to-2021 period, from $1.5 billion in 2017 to $3.5 billion in 2021.
DataGravity Has a Virtual Appliance
DataGravity came into the security market in 2014 with its Discovery Series array line, integrating the separate functions of data security, search/discovery and protection into one platform. It also provides visibility, including context, into data as it is created.
Using that software as a base, the Nashua, N.H.-based company last winter released a virtual appliance, DataGravity for Virtualization. This visibility leads to security insight, which HyTrust now expects to use to identify and classify data and tag workloads to ensure policy enforcement for data access, encryption and key management and applying boundary controls.
HyTrust has built itself through acquisitions. Three years ago, the company bought HighCloud security to add data security and encryption for workloads, which became the foundation for the cloud and virtualization encryption solution HyTrust DataControl.