HyTrust raises $36M and acquires DataGravity

Word spread late last week that data visibility and security startup #DataGravity had been acquired. At the time, though, it was unclear by whom. Now we know. It was #HyTrust, a company that specializes in securing workloads that run in private and public clouds. The details of the deal were not disclosed, but over the course of its startup life, DataGravity had raised $92 million from the likes of Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, CRV and General Catalyst. HyTrust made the acquisition announcement in parallel with its latest funding announcements. The company today said that it has raised a $36 million Series E round led by Advance Venture Partners, with participation from its existing venture capital and strategic investors. These include Sway Ventures, Epic Ventures, Vanedge Capital, Trident Capital, Cisco, Fortinet, Intel and VMware. Today’s investment brings the total investment into the Mountain View-based company to $95.5 million, excluding two debt financing rounds in 2015 and 2016 that totaled another $13 million. While HyTrust has been around since 2007, there can be little doubt that interest in its services is probably growing rapidly right now as companies try to shield themselves from what looks like an ever-increasing security risk. “HyTrust is very well positioned to capitalize on a tremendous growth opportunity in the cloud security space,” said David ibnAle, a founding partner of AVP. “The need for security, automated compliance and policy enforcement for cloud infrastructure and data is critical in almost every industry, and HyTrust is front and center in this field.” The company plans to use the new funding to expand its sales and marketing teams and fund new product development. As for the acquisition, HyTrust says that it will use DataGravity’s technology to expand its data security solutions and to “further automate and enhance security policy enforcement for workload data.” DataGravity provides its users with tools to secure their data and, for example, help them adhere to local data privacy laws and recover after being hit with ransomware. Given HyTrust’s focus on workloads and DataGravity’s focus on data, the two products should turn out to be pretty complementary. “The acquisition will accelerate the expansion of HyTrust’s platform capabilities and capitalize on the high-growth cloud security market,” writes Eric Chiu, HyTrust’s co-founder and president, in today’s announcement. “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.” A HyTrust spokesperson tells me that the company will continue to sell a re-branded version of DataGravity’s software and that it will continue to support DataGravity’s software customers that sign a new support contract with HyTrust.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/11/hytrust-raises-36m-and-acquires-datagravity/

DataGravity swallowed by mystery buyer

Exclusive Ninety-two million dollars and a pivot or two later, virtualised data guardian DataGravity has been acquired, The Register can reveal. Not all employees were retained but the company – snapped up around June 30 – is still operational and will be making marketing moves to announce its new status in a week or two, according to CTO David Siles. A source told us DataGravity appeared to close down on June 15, with an internal shutdown warning on June 7. There were many layoffs in the weeks leading up to this, and attempts to sell DataGravity, with its US-based engineering team, possibly to Veeam and Zerto, but they were unsuccessful. Attempts to raise more money failed. Our source said John Joseph, one of the founders, left in March and it was confirmed by Siles that he had stepped down as president but was still on the board

 called Siles on July 2 asking if DataGravity had closed down and he said: "You indeed have bad information about DataGravity, we did not shut down, much more exciting than that actually." A call was scheduled after the July 4th holiday.

Departures

LinkedIn shows many people have recently left, including the CFO:

CFO Becky Zehr left in June 2017 and is "looking for the next opportunity to do something great."Stephen R. Moreau, a senior QA engineer, left DataGravity in June 2017, and is now working for Parallel Wireless.Senior technical support engineer Jill Manfield left in JuneSoftware Director Ken St. Hilaire left DataGravity in March 2017.Jeremy Smola, a DataGravity technical staff member, started a new position as a QA engineer at Thunderhead in April 2017.Nathan Palmer left DataGravity in March 2017 and joined Nasuni as a principle SW engineer.Geoffrey Hickey in March 2017 to join DigitalOcean as a senior SW engineer.Dan Christians in March 2017 to join Nasuni as SW development test engineer.William Urban now director for technical marketing at iland Cloud, left DataGravity in March 2017.DataGravity office manager Kath Antista is looking for a new post in the southern New Hampshire area.Background

DataGravity was founded by Paula Long and John Joseph in 2012 and took in its $92m in three funding rounds: $12m in 2012, $30m in 2013 and $50m in 2014. Generally we might have hoped for an IPO around now if things had been going well or a fourth funding round if more development was needed.

Paula Long previously and famously co-founded iSCSI storage array supplier EqualLogic in 2001 and it was bought for $1.4bn by Dell in November 2007.

DataGravity was started up to build storage that was aware of the data it stored and monitored things like file creation, keyword content, document changes and accesses, to provide intelligent data protection and collaboration features. It was one of the first new wave data management startups collecting and using unstructured file metadata, and launched its Discovery array in 2014, at which time it received its $50 million C-round of funding.

However commodity hardware running software-defined storage and data management software with a more specific focus became the thing; witness Primary Data (end over-provisining of all storage), Cohesity (consolidate secondary storage) and Rubrik (data protection with the public cloud.)

Discovery array sales did grow fast enough to justify continuing production, and the startup began cutting its cash burn rate.

There were layoffs in February and March 2016 as costs were cut, and some senior excs left in August that year.

In January this year DataGravity stopped selling its Discovery Array and shipped its Discovery softwareas a virtual appliance instead.

May saw DataGravity for Availability, supporting Veeam Backup and monitoring data exposure and security threats in a Veeam backup repository. It looks at user and file behaviour, identifying and stopping attacks against data such as ransomware, and provides, it said, forensics-level recovery based on a full audit trail of all the changes that occurred within and across backups and by whom.

DataGravity's fate

Now it has, according to Siles, been acquired by a company whose name he can't divulge and for an amount he can't reveal. During the process; "We tried to accommodate as many people as possible [but] not everyone was retained."

The 4th of July weekend interrupted the post-acquisition work of informing channel and other business partners and that is taking place now. He stressed DataGravity is operational and marketing to the public will start in a week or two.

As is customary in such events, Siles said: "We're all very excited, along with our new colleagues."

Reg comment

It seems likely that DataGravity has been rescued/acquired by a larger storage or data management company lacking its app-aware data access and security features.

Candidates could be #Dell, #HDS, #HPE, and #NetApp. A distant alternative is a private-equity-owned supplier or a (very) well-funded startup

We think it likely that DataGravity may be run as a wholly owned subsidiary of its acquirer but, obviously, will have to wait and see what is revealed later this month. ®

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/05/datagravity_acquisition/

Using Data Gravity to Accelerate your Business

#DataGravity In an age where data is considered the new oil and technology companies account for the global top-five largest companies by market capitalisation – overtaking the oil conglomerates in the process – businesses need to give due consideration to how best to utilise data. One concept that is becoming particularly popular is called data gravity. Data gravity is the concept that, similar to how a planet exerts a gravitational force pulling other objects towards it, accumulated data draws further data and applications towards it. The term has been around for years, but few in enterprise really understand its benefits for their business. By its very nature, data gravity vastly improves the speed at which data is processed and communicated within a business. As organisations migrate infrastructure to the cloud, data outside the cloud begins to gravitate towards applications running inside it. As data is pulled closer to that infrastructure, organisations will experience reduced latency, increased application performance, and improved business efficiency. When data makes its way to the cloud, it will attract more applications and the data will become more valuable as its utility increases, it becomes a virtuous circle. Any enterprise, regardless of industry, can make use of data gravity. So how do you take advantage? There are three key concepts to consider when adopting data gravity: Latency: missing out by a second A defining concept of data gravity is location: the further your data has to travel, the longer it takes for the various pieces of your organisation’s infrastructure to communicate with each other. This lost time, whilst measured in only seconds, could easily mean hundreds of lost customers every day, depending on the size of your business. A 2015 Microsoft study found that since the year 2000, the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to only eight seconds. Consider what this could mean for an advertising company. Long load times for ads could result in them rarely, if ever, being seen. Another study found that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less and 40% will abandon a website that takes more than three. Data gravity reduces the effective distance between the relevant parts, reducing the time it takes for data to be transferred to the consumer. The more infrastructure, applications and data you have in the cloud, the more you can leverage data gravity to reduce latency and boost the connection to your consumers.

http://www.cbronline.com/news/big-data/using-data-gravity-accelerate-business/

DataGravity Adds Behavior-Driven Data Management To Veeam Environments

Today at #VeeamOn 2017, #DataGravity announced DataGravity for Availability with #Veeam support. DataGravity states that its new solution will be the first to automatically respond, in real-time, to data exposure and security threats in a Veeam backup repository. This behavior-driven management will help companies to better defend insider threats while also providing higher levels of visibility and availability.

Data security and classification is popping up quite a bit in the mainstream news, but it is an issue that stays at the top of enterprises’ minds. While Veeam is in the business of backing up and replicating data to keep it safe, those using Veeam need a way to see what is in their data and who accessing it. DataGravity is the right company to provide such insights.

When we reviewed DataGravity’s Discovery Series, we found it to be a way for companies to get a better understanding of, and get a fuller use of their data. Not only could user store data on the array, they could easily track it and see if someone that shouldn’t be accessing it, was doing so. DataGravity is taking this same method and applying it to data protection. With what it calls “minimum impact on the IT infrastructure,” DataGravity for Availability uses intuitive self-management to monitor both user and file behavior. The solution is able to spot and stop an attack (such as ransomeware) and then uses the restore capabilities native to Veeam for rapid recovery. This rapid recovery results in little to no data loss and provides a “forensics-level recovery” using a full audit trail of all the changes that occurred within and across backups and by whom.

DataGravity for Availability includes:

An orchestration framework: Customers can define a set of actions that are activated when specific content or anomalous user behavior is detected.Forensic-level recovery: IT and security teams get a full trace of user and file changes to guide fine-grain restores. These are triggered in real-time once an incident, such as an insider threat or ransomware, is recognized and halted.Seamless Veeam integration: Solution is specifically designed to visualize, secure and protect data in Veeam virtual environments.

Both DataGravity for Virtualization and DataGravity for Availability with Veeam work seamlessly together, giving users complete protection of their VMs inside and out. 

http://www.storagereview.com/datagravity_adds_behaviordriven_data_management_to_veeam_environments

Smart Storage Startup DataGravity Pulls the Plug on Its Hardware Business

#DataGravity, a startup that aims to secure corporate data where it is stored, is getting out of the hardware business and will focus on providing software that runs on other vendors’ storage arrays.

The company will continue to support current customers who bought the software as part of a storage array, according to chief executive Paula Long. She acknowledged there will be some job cuts associated with this move, but declined to provide details. The Nashua, N.H.-based company had some cutbacks last month.

http://fortune.com/2016/03/14/datagravity-pulls-plug-hardware/