Cloud computing security firm HyTrust Inc. is bolstering its portfolio with a new offering that enables enterprises to identify their most sensitive data and put safeguards in place to ensure it’s protected.

The company said its new CloudAdvisor product is designed to “proactively identify risks to sensitive data” and also protect it from “inadvertent exposure, data loss, malicious activity and regulatory non-compliance.” In simpler terms, CloudAdvisor provides a way to easily define, detect and defend companies’ most valuable information.

“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,” said HyTrust founder and President Eric Chiu.

CloudAdvisor is deployed as a virtual appliance within virtualized computer environments, and can integrate with virtual machines, Active Directory and storage snapshots. It works by discovering the inventory of VMs customers are running, and from there monitors, tracks and analyzes data access patterns, usage and file content across all of those VMs. Data can then be visualized and explored, allowing users to gain useful business insights.

However, the real benefit is security, with preset alerts able to warn users of any security concerns, suspicious activity and compliance violations. HyTrust said it built CloudAdvisor from the technology it gained following its acquisition of data visibility and security firm DataGravity Inc. in July.

“Security teams need to know more about what sensitive data is flying around virtualized data centers to be able to effectively control access and reduce the risk of damaging disclosure events,” said Eric Ogren, senior security analyst at 451 Research Inc. “The combination of data-centric and activity-centric intelligence is essential in securing workloads. HyTrust adds CloudAdvisor to its portfolio of cloud security products the ability to identify and classify data in unstructured files – a problem which can bedevil traditional approaches.”

Image: HyTrust