Enterprises seeking highly secure and compliant cloud computing, whether in private, public or hybrid clouds, may find that the Trusted Execution Technology produced by chipmaker, Intel, provides the strong hardware authentication which enables them to implement a range of high security features including malware/virus prevention, BIOS authentication, hypervisor authentication, geotagging and geofencing.
This is certainly the view of IaaS provider, Virtustream, which has now fully integrated Intel TXT as it is known into both the xStream 2.2 cloud management software and its IaaS cloud.
The recently announced xStream 2.2secure hybrid cloud solution is claimed by the company to be the first cloud management platform for private/hybrid/public clouds to enable Intel TXT. This gives it secure, trusted resource pools available for any application. xStream 2.2 complies with the latest Intel Attestation Service architecture, which virtually eliminates supply chain risks by ensuring that all computing resources can be identified, tracked and monitored to ensure that they are free from malware and viruses at the BIOS and hypervisor layers.
It now also enables geotagging and geofencing, as described in NIST 7904 Guidance. Geotagging identifies the physical location of both hosts and virtual machines, ensuring that applications are always running in known, trusted locations within the datacentre. GeoFencing creates a list of trusted locations where an application can run in a compliant manner. This ensures that applications are not improperly moved (via hypervisor live migration or operator error) to a non-compliant location within the datacentre or another city/region/country.
Virtustream also claims to be the first cloud service provider and cloud management platform to satisfy the commercial and federal industry requirements for PII and workload locational compliance that can be configured, tracked and audited from the CPU silicon, through hypervisor, OS and virtual machines in private and hybrid clouds.
“Enterprise clients have shown great interest in using Intel® TXT and Virtustream’s xStream workload orchestration software to increase workload integrity and compliance while addressing a wide range of workload sizes”
“Virtustream's partnership with Intel has been built on our common belief that enterprise class clouds must closely integrate software and hardware to give our clients the most advanced security features and compliance capabilities which reduce risk and costs,” said Kevin Reid, CEO and CTO of Virtustream. “By integrating Intel TXT, xStream moves several steps ahead of any other hybrid cloud solution. The combination of application-level SLAs and security compliance gives our customers a tremendous advantage and new options for how they can deploy business-critical applications in the cloud.”
