HyTrust, Inc., the leader in proactive control, compliance and visibility over virtualized environments and the entire cloud stack, today announced that it has been included in the Gartner Inc. Risk Management, Privacy and Compliance 2011 list of “Cool Vendors.” The report, published April 15, 2011, is designed to highlight new and innovative vendors, products and services in the space.

The Gartner “Cool Vendors in Risk Management, Privacy and Compliance, 2011” report, authored by Carsten Casper, French Caldwell, Neil MacDonald and Kenneth Chin, cites key findings with regards to the key risk management and compliance challenges. It states: “Sophisticated tools are necessary to manage vendors, monitor virtualized environments, locate stores of sensitive information, understand large amounts of regulatory knowledge and control your online reputation.” The report further states that “In a virtualized environment, policy compliance provided by the underlying platform is often not sufficient, and access control is not granular enough.”

HyTrust helps organizations leverage their investments in VMware by enabling them to confidently virtualize workloads subject to compliance as well as to transform their virtual infrastructure into private clouds. Extending the capabilities of the underlying platform, HyTrust Appliance ensures that real-world security and compliance policies are enforceable within the virtual infrastructure.

As organizations virtualize workloads that are subject to compliance—including PCI-DSS, SOX, HIPAA, and more—a common set of requirements has emerged that address the risks introduced by virtualization. To satisfy auditors, organizations must consistently:

1. Demonstrate that they establish administrative separation of duty (or least privileged access) for the host;

2. Routinely monitor and maintain secure host configuration;

3. Logically (or physically) segment virtual workloads according to its classification;

4. Tie administrative access to specific user identities; and

5. Log all administrative activity.

Whether limiting administrative access to a specific type of virtual machine, segmenting infrastructure for use by multiple business units, or ensuring that a workload with sensitive data is never connected to an insecure network, HyTrust Appliance provides the flexibility to define and enforce the policies that enable the cloud and satisfy the requirements of even the most demanding auditors.

“We are excited to be named a ‘Cool Vendor’ by Gartner and consider our inclusion in the report as confirmation of HyTrust’s unique ability to manage risks and achieve compliance within virtual infrastructure. We’re proud to provide an enabling technology that helps our customers to virtualize more, to take advantage of the cost savings and agility benefits afforded by virtualization, and to achieve their desire to deploy fully functional private clouds,” said Eric Chiu, founder and president of HyTrust.