HyTrust Acquires DataGravity

HyTrust, Inc., a leading workload security provider, today announced the acquisition of DataGravity, a data visibility and security company, to further automate and enhance security policy enforcement for workload data. The acquisition brings new data discovery and classification expertise that expand HyTrust data security solutions focused on protecting workload data. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but members of the DataGravity team will be joining HyTrust.

Also, today HyTrust announced it has raised $36 million in new funding, with this latest round of investment going towards expanding its sales and marketing efforts, and for new product development and acquisitions.

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.

"The acquisition will accelerate the expansion of HyTrust’s platform capabilities and capitalize on the high-growth cloud security market," said Eric Chiu, HyTrust’s co-founder and president. "DataGravity’s data discovery and classification capabilities support HyTrust’s mission to deliver a security policy framework that provides customers with full visibility, insight and enforcement of policy across workloads. We couldn’t be more excited."

DataGravity burst on the scene with the 2014 debut of its Discovery Series array line, integrating the separate functions of data security, search and discovery, and protection into one platform while providing visibility, including context, into data as it is created. Using that software as a base, earlier this year the Nashua, N.H.-based company released a virtual appliance, DataGravity for Virtualization. From that visibility comes insights, 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 before through acquisitions. Three years ago, the company bought HighCloud security to add data security and encryption for workloads, which became the foundation for the successful cloud and virtualization encryption solution HyTrust DataControl. DataGravity raised $92 million from top investors including Andreessen-Horowitz, Accel Partners, CRV and General Partners.

"In today’s digital era, data and workload Availability is paramount," said Peter McKay, Co-CEO and President at Veeam. "Veeam has been working closely with both HyTrust and Data Gravity to develop joint solutions that meet customers’ needs for 24.7.365 Availability, and it is great to see two of our strategic partners come together, accelerating the deployment of solutions that will address customer needs for policy-driven data security in virtualized data centers."