Pivot3 added new security capabilities to its Intelligence Engine — essentially the brain behind the vendor’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack — to protect data using encryption and key management.

In addition to its super-fast NVMe flash architecture, Pivot3’s key differentiator when it comes to other HCI software companies it its Intelligence Engine. This policy-based management system  automates data placement, resource allocation, and data protection tasks based on service level agreements (SLAs) and business priorities. It also scales as needed across on-premises, edge, and cloud infrastructures from a single pane-of-glass. This all improves application performance and allows customers to run mixed-application workloads on HCI while reducing time, cost, and complexity — the holy grail of hyperconverged infrastructure.

The new policy-based security management will be available in Acuity version 10.6 before the end of the year.

Adding these automated security capabilities to the Pivot3 Intelligence Engine enables customers to integrate data encryption and key management into the same workflow for managing applications and storage, said Mike Koponen, senior director for product and solutions marketing at Pivot3. Customers “can encrypt it while they create it, and then assign a key to it, and away they go,” he said. “It’s really simple and it’s all wrapped in this policy-based intelligence.”

The company also designed the data encryption algorithm to leverage Intel Xeon CPUs AES New Instructions (AES NI) to ensure minimal performance impact and low overhead. This accelerates data encryption in the Intel chip, which improves workload speed and performance by offloading.

Additionally, the key management capabilities that are integrated into the new security policies supports the Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) standards. This will eventually allow it to support a range of third-party key managers. Currently, it integrates with HyTrust’s KeyControl key management software.

“Since we’ve partnered closely with HyTrust from a security standpoint in the past, we support HyTrust right out of the gate at launch,” Koponen said.