IBM and Intel New Security Features to the Cloud: realities, stakes and recommendations.

More and more organizations move sensitive and mission-critical operations and data to the cloud. This means inter alia that they need : cloud environments with the same, if not greater levels of security as on-premise technology environments.

‘’Monitoring and security down to the microchip level’’!, exciting like approach to meet security challenges in our ever changing environment with sophisticated attacks targeting digital assets. 

Connectikpeople.co, soon #Retinknow, salutes the new commitment of IBM via SoftLayer (its global cloud platform) to offer ‘’bare metal’’ servers powered by Intel® Cloud Technology that can provide monitoring and security down to the microchip level. 

In fact, Intel^® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel^® TXT) which provides hardware monitoring and security controls , help henceforth assure businesses that a workload from a known location on SoftLayer infrastructure is running on trusted hardware. 

Connectikpeople.co, soon #Retinknow always recommends seamless hybrid and cloud environments that can be trusted from end-to-end.

If unfamiliar, Connectikpeople.co, soon #Retinknow, recalls that Intel TXT can be especially advantageous for large enterprises subject to compliance and audit regulations, such as healthcare, financial services and government organizations.

This technology can help ensure that trusted resources can be integrated, managed and reported on with the relevant compliance frameworks (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP, ISO, FISMA, SSAE16). 

It is exciting to observe that Intel TXT can verify the components of a computing system from its operating system or hypervisor all the way to its boot firmware and hardware. 

Connectikpeople.co, soon #Retinknow, can also observe that combined with attestation (root of trust software) this verification is then used to permit or deny a workload from running on that select server system. 

Hybrid cloud solutions can leverage partner software and Intel TXT, to limit data decryption to specific geo-located servers, in support of local data privacy laws.

Designed to measure the execution environment and protect sensitive information from software-based attacks Intel TXT operates with TPM, an industry-standard device that can securely store the measurement artifacts, to verify the integrity of the hardware, firmware and software.