IBM announced that its SoftLayer cloud line will be the first cloud platform to offer its customers bare metal servers powered by Intel cloud technology, designed to provide monitoring and security down to the microchip level.
The Intel offering, Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT), is engineered to provide 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 provides an essential level of confidence—and even compliance certification—for organizations moving sensitive operations to the cloud.
“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.”
Intel TXT helps ensure that trusted resources can be integrated, managed and reported on with the relevant compliance frameworks (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP, ISO, FISMA, and SSAE16). With IBM Cloud and SoftLayer infrastructure, these organizations will be able to certify a cloud computing pool 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.
Intel TXT verifies the components of a computing system from its operating system or hypervisor all the way to its boot firmware and hardware. 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. And because Intel TXT is activated during boot up, this added security does not add any performance overhead to applications.
For more information, visit www.softlayer.com/intel-txt.