HyTrust

Entrust bought HyTrust in January 2021 to combine workload encryption and data access controls with its own hardware security modules, certificate management, and identity proofing tools — a vertically integrated platform for securing machine identities. The products now sell as Entrust CloudControl and Entrust KeyControl. Entrust's stated rationale was that enterprises migrating to hybrid cloud needed encryption keys and policy to follow data regardless of where workloads execute.

Public records and case studies indicate deployments within the US Department of Energy, national laboratories, large US financial institutions, and managed hosting providers who needed to demonstrate administrator separation-of-duties to auditors. The common thread was a regulated environment where virtualizing sensitive workloads required compensating controls on the hypervisor management plane.

VMware's native role-based access control and logging were tied to vSphere and evolved slowly. HyTrust offered policy federation across VMware, AWS, and Azure from a single console, hardware-rooted key management that integrated with external HSMs, and a compliance reporting module tuned for PCI DSS, HIPAA, and NIST 800-53 audits. HyTrust competed as a neutral layer that worked identically in vSphere, OpenStack, and public cloud.

No. Entrust Corporation, a private identity and data security firm owned by Thoma Bravo, acquired HyTrust as a wholly owned subsidiary in January 2021. The HyTrust products have been rebranded under the Entrust DataControl and KeyControl product lines. There is no standalone HyTrust entity operating today.