Pivot3 Adds Security Management Features to Platform

With security being top of mind for businesses, Pivot3, the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor, on Tuesday announced new policy-based security management capabilities for its core Intelligence Engine.

The vendor’s Intelligence Engine provides policy-based, priority-aware management for performance, automation of data placement, data protection, and intelligent monitoring and analytics.

“Now we’ve added a fifth area to our Intelligence Engine around policy-based security management,” Mike Koponen, senior director, product and solutions marketing at Pivot3, told Channel Futures. “Data security and privacy is a top priority for CEO, particularly in highly regulated industries such as financial services, health care, energy and utilities, and education.”

The new policy-based security management capabilities will enable customers to seamlessly integrate data encryption and key management into the same workflow for managing applications and storage.

“With security threats on the rise and regulations around data security increasing, CIOs and CISOs face new challenges as they seek to protect sensitive, mission-critical data without compromising performance,” said John Spiers, vice president of strategy at Pivot3. “Customers rely on us every day to simplify management at scale. This extension of Pivot3’s Intelligence Engine brings new confidence to IT in knowing that data can be secured and protected as it moves across the entire hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

To address the increased regulation and compliance requirements, the new capability includes flexible, secure multitenancy and data-at-rest encryption at a system, volume or virtual machine level, compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2. To achieve this, Pivot3 designed its data-encryption algorithms to leverage Intel Xeon CPUs AES New Instructions (AES NI) to ensure minimal performance impact and low overhead.

Pivot3’s Mike Koponen

“Customers are concerned about the impact that encryption could have on performance. By utilizing Intel Xeon AES NI, there’s minimal impact … ” said Koponen.

Pivot3 says its integrated key management supports Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) standards to provide broad support of key managers. Adherence to KMIP standards allows Pivot3 to partner with HyTrust KeyControl, giving enterprises the ability to easily manage all encryption keys at scale, including how often keys are rotated and how they are shared securely, the company said.

HyTrust specializes in security, compliance and control software for virtualization of information technology infrastructure.

“HyTrust is the first key management vendor that we’re working with; however, we will engage with other third-party vendors going forward,” said Koponen.

Customers have the option of turning data-at-rest encryption on and off as needed for a volume or VM.

One other thing customers need to know is that as they move data from the edge to the core to the cloud, data that’s encrypted stays encrypted.

“As organizations evolve to address emerging security threats and changing regulations, automation and intelligence become key ingredients in maintaining a secure infrastructure across the edge, core and cloud,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst at 451 Group. “By adding policy-based security management features to its Intelligence Engine, Pivot3 is simplifying the process of protecting sensitive and mission-critical data and enabling customers to progress toward a software-defined data center.”

Expect to see the Pivot3 policy-based security management in Acuity version 10.6 by year-end.