Virtustream buys ViewTrust to make its cloud still more secure

Public-cloud provider Virtustream already has a reputation for being secure and enterprise-ready, and it’s looking to to strengthen that reputation.

The company has acquired called Viewtrust Technology, which specializes in security and regulatory compliance, for an undisclosed sum.

As a result of the deal, Virtustream‘s own cloud services will get several new features, including the ability to monitor data to ensure it remains secure and in compliance with applicable regulatory standards. And Virtustream will have a more full-fledged software offering to sell to other public-cloud companies.

“A lot of enterprises go through compliance exercises or certification around adherence to compliance,” Rodney Rogers, Virtustream’s chief executive, told VentureBeat. “This is something that automates the continuous audit of all the things that affect your data, all the things that affect your processes — a set of alerts and a set of actions that are corrective in nature in order to stay in compliance.”

Such abilities could be quite useful for companies thinking more seriously about using the public cloud in addition to or even instead of relying on their own on-premises infrastructure.

As the public-cloud market grows, it has become increasingly important for cloud providers to differentiate and tell a story that’s different from what other vendors are saying.

Virtustream is investing more in an area where it has already received recognition. It was called out for “meeting enterprise security and compliance needs in a recent Gartner report on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vendors. Focusing more on such areas could help it stand out.

Meanwhile, other cloud providers are finding different ways to differentiate themselves. DigitalOcean, for instance, is pursuing simplicity at scale. And IBM wants to be geographically distributed; it’s even thinking about ways to configure workloads based on carbon emissions.

At the same time, Amazon Web Services was early to market in IaaS and has continued to lead the market, with new options and price cuts coming at a steady pace.

Which is why it makes lots of sense for Virtustream to enhance its feature set around security and regulatory compliance. That’s especially true after leaks emerged last year about the National Security Agency’s spying activities. And now some companies in foreign countries are thinking more seriously about hosting applications closer to their own offices, instead of in the U.S. That could translate into increased demand for IaaS based in countries other than the U.S.

“Outside the U.S., the sensitivities to the issues that happened with the NSA and [former NSA contractor Edward] Snowden and the like have actually done quite a bit to help us sell our software to service providers that are looking to set up regionally domicile IaaS,” Rogers said.

With new security and compliance capabilities coming to Virtustream’s xStream cloud-management software, the company stands to run forward

ViewTrust was based in Falls Church, Va., with about 30 employees. It never took on venture funding. Virtustream, based in Bethesda, Md., started in 2009, and it operates data centers in London, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Customers include Domino Sugar, Intel, and Kawasaki. Virtustream has received $119 million in funding, most recently taking a $40 million round led by database company SAP.