IBM has announced that SoftLayer will be the first cloud platform to offer its customers bare metal servers powered by Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT), with monitoring and security down to the microchip level. IBM will also be offering services to help customers implement this new capability into their applications and platforms.
Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT) provides hardware monitoring and security controls that help assure businesses that a workload from a known location on SoftLayer infrastructure is running on trusted hardware. This assurance would provide an essential level of confidence – and even compliance certification – for organizations moving sensitive and mission-critical operations to cloud hosting environments.
Compliance and audit regulations
“It is becoming increasingly important to provide cloud environments with the same, if not greater levels of security as your on premise technology environments,” said Rick Echevarria, Vice President of Intel Security Group, General Manager, Intel Security Platform and Solutions Divisions. “By building on IBM’s history of security innovation, with this solution based on Intel TXT, SoftLayer is demonstrating that such levels of cloud security are now possible and available.”
Intel TXT is especially advantageous for large enterprises subject to compliance and audit regulations, such as healthcare, financial services and government organizations. It helps ensure that trusted resources can be integrated, managed and reported on with the relevant compliance frameworks (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP, ISO, FISMA, SSAE16).
With IBM Cloud and SoftLayer infrastructure, these organizations would be able to certify a cloud computing pool that is appropriately secured for workloads with exposures such as governance and enterprise risk, information and life-cycle management, compliance and audit, application security, identity and access management and incident response.
Trusted Platform Module
“Security perception remains the biggest hurdle for wide-spread enterprise cloud adoption,” said Marc Jones, CTO for SoftLayer. “SoftLayer is the only bare-metal cloud platform offering Intel TXT, leading the industry in enabling customers to build hybrid and cloud environments that can be trusted from end-to-end.”
To use Intel TXT, SoftLayer customers need only order bare metal servers available with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) installed. Once activated and deployed with attestation software, Intel TXT allows clients to build trusted computing pools of IT resources in cloud hosting environments with an added level of visibility and control.
