HyTrust, the leader in policy management and access control for virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced a new Vblock Ready certification as part of VCE’s Technology Alliance Program. VCE, makers of Vblock Systems, is the leader in converged infrastructure. HyTrust has developed and is now offering a fully-integrated solution that leverages the features and benefits of HyTrust Appliance to enable security, control, management and compliance within the high performance, high availability and highly flexible VCE Vblock Systems. This in response to customer demand for a solution that meets the needs of organizations operating in regulated industries. The integrated solution helps ensure that compliance requirements do not present a hurdle for organizations that want to move towards virtualized and cloud-based IT environments.

Meeting compliance requirements -- particularly in regulated industries such as Government (FISMA Certification and Accreditation (C&A) / FedRAMP), Banking (Basel III, OCC), Healthcare (HIPAA), Utilities (FERC, NERC) and Retail (PCI) -- must be taken into account when moving to any cloud computing model.

“While a converged infrastructure delivers significant benefits by unifying compute, network, storage and management resources, there are challenging security and control issues that must be addressed, including role-based access control (RBAC) and reporting,” said Eric Chiu, president and founder, HyTrust. “The combined HyTrust offering creates a single, superior solution, especially where mission-critical applications and workloads factor in.”

The HyTrust solution, combined with VCE Vblock Systems, integrates security and control with the highest levels of flexibility, performance and availability. It works on any Vblock Series 300 or Series 700 System, using any of the available Advanced Management Pod (AMP) options.

"Many of the largest enterprises are choosing pre-integrated Vblock Systems for their cloud initiatives to address scale and time-to-market requirements,” said Todd Pavone, executive vice president, VCE. “Many of these customers are deploying converged infrastructure with mission-critical applications that require security and control, and have compliance mandates attached as well. By working with HyTrust, VCE is helping customers deploy a pre-tested/proven and validated solution to meet their needs."

“Vblock Ready” certification was achieved by HyTrust to ensure interoperability with the various components within the Vblock Systems. Customers can be assured that adding HyTrust security features to a Vblock System will not hinder performance and will enable high consolidation ratios as well as simplified management.

Many organizations are moving to converged infrastructure using Vblock Systems for compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management, and also want the ease and convenience of using familiar security and control technologies.

“CoSentry has architected its hosted cloud environment with Vblock Systems for converged infrastructure, which has enabled us to achieve high scalability and datacenter efficiency,” said Anna Sharack, CISSP, SBCI, Director of Compliance & Security. “Combining the two offerings adds security and control to our Vblock System environment, which also enables us, in turn, to provide a Compliance Regulated Environment (CRE) to our customers as we host critical PCI and other regulated data. This is a major advantage and differentiator that sets CoSentry apart from other cloud providers.”