HyTrust Announces CloudControl for VMware NSX

FROM VMWORLD 2015 IN SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Aug. 31, 2015 – HyTrust Inc., the Cloud Security Automation Company, today announced a new release of HyTrust CloudControl—the virtual appliance that resides between administrators and VMware vSphere® to add critical role-based access controls, visibility and secure multi-tenancy to the virtual infrastructure. Version 4.5 adds new features to augment VMware NSX™ micro-segmentation with administrator permissions for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). The new offering delivers an industry-first separation of operator duties and monitoring access to ensure that only authorized personnel can configure security controls and policies.

Adoption of the Software-Defined Data Center architecture has gained traction in the marketplace because it enables greater agility, scalability and workload security. As organizations have increasingly virtualized their infrastructure, often as much as 95 percent of compute, the server-to-server traffic has grown to represent as much as 80% of overall data center traffic. Traditional IT security controls focus on perimeter defense but traffic in the data center is not inspected. Modern-day attacks exploit this gap, potentially leading to serious breaches. VMware NSX makes micro-segmentation of network traffic or a zero trust security model feasible and scalable enabling protection at the workload level. HyTrust CloudControl 4.5 builds on this capability to enable authentication and granular role-based access control for NSX administrators.

“HyTrust is proud to work with VMware on a solution that provides customers fine-grained administrative access to configure, control and monitor security policies for micro-segments, and we believe this delivers an important capability for organizations pursuing network virtualization,” said Eric Chiu, co-founder and President of HyTrust. “HyTrust customers including some of the largest F1000 companies in healthcare, financial services and retail who have already deployed HyTrust’s administrative controls can now expand their deployment to include NSX.”

“VMware NSX is a platform that partners such as HyTrust are leveraging to provide customers with advanced services that can solve some of their most pressing data center operational challenges,” said Rod Stuhlmuller, senior director, product marketing, networking and security business unit at VMware. “Through our collaboration with HyTrust, customers adopting an SDDC approach can apply HyTrust’s role-based access controls to NSX administrative tasks to easily map to existing operational policies and separation-of-duties objectives.”

The key benefits of the new HyTrust CloudControl protection for VMware NSX include:

  • Significant time savings on compliance and audit reporting, along with faster resolution for troubleshooting and advanced reporting on NSX administrative access and changes.
  • Reduced downtime and service disruption by protecting the virtualized network from process failure or configuration administrative error with change controls.
  • Ensure authentication and authorization requirements are met for VMware NSX deployments including; two-factor authentication, tokens, TACACS+ and RADIUS, smart cards and AAA servers.

“With its support for NSX, HyTrust CloudControl provides controls needed to enable organizations to implement fine-grained administrator policies for network virtualization,” said Lance Arnold, Chief Technologist for a large program at SAIC. “The network micro-segmentation provided by VMware NSX delivers controls to segment workloads within the data center, but controls are also required to provide the needed segmentation of administrator roles and policy.”

“In the SDDC world, organizations need the segmentation of administrative roles, just as they have with physical environments,” said Jon Oltsik, Senior Principal Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “NSX virtualization of the network allows those with access to make changes to the network that otherwise require greater controls. The HyTrust offering can provide an enhanced level of protection without disrupting operations, representing a potential advancement in this important field.”

Pricing & Availability

HyTrust CloudControl version 4.5 is generally available now and pricing for the VMware NSX protection starts at $1650 per NSX socket. For more information on HyTrust CloudControl version 4.5 and new NSX capabilities, visit the HyTrust website.