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New-gen security and data protection provider HyTrust offered a late-year holiday present for its customers, releasing a new product Dec. 19 called CloudAdvisor to support its workload security platform.
CloudAdvisor is the HyTrust-branded version of a product it acquired in the Data Gravity acquisition last July. The software is versatile, enabling companies to proactively identify risks to sensitive data and protect it against inadvertent exposure, data loss, malicious and careless users and malicious activity. It also helps administrators guard against regulatory non-compliance.
Deployed as a virtual appliance, CloudAdvisor secures and protects data from the inside out, providing organizations with the ability to define, detect and defend their most valuable information, HyTrust founder and President Eric Chiu told eWEEK.
“CloudAdvisor allows us to define, detect and protect the data that is now running in the cloud, which is the predominate data for most organizations now,” Chiu said. “It’s an important part (of a security system) because when you look at the proliferation of unstructured data and you combine that with the proliferation of data in the cloud, most companies do not know where their sensitive or regulated data is.
“CloudAdvisor defines what constitutes sensitive data by scanning virtual machines on- or off-premises, then automates the security–whether it’s controls that need to be in place or encryption.”
Organizations using CloudAdvisor can automate the complex and time-intensive process of sensitive business-data discovery, classification and protection across private cloud and SDDC (software-defined data center) environments, Chiu said.
CloudAdvisor works as a virtual appliance within a virtual environment, integrating fully with VMs, Active Directory and storage-based snapshots. It starts by discovering the VM inventory and then delivers initial results of its ongoing analysis. From then on, it monitors, tracks and analyzes data-access patterns, data usage and file content across all VMs under management, with results optimized for data visualization, exploration and wizard-based workflows, Chiu said.
Pre-set alerts notify interested parties of security concerns, suspicious activities and compliance violations.
The primary markets for Cloud Advisor are companies with voluminous unstructured data and/or small IT teams, as well as firms in regulated industries, such as finance, health care, government, and the law, Chiu said.
“It’s a real struggle, for some companies, to manually identify and secure unstructured, high-value data assets that reside deep within their unprotected virtual deployments and cloud-storage solutions,” Chiu said. “HyTrust CloudAdvisor provides visibility, insight, and actionable intelligence into the confidential and unstructured business data indiscriminately replicated across an organization’s virtual environments.”
For more information about HyTrust CloudAdvisor, go here.