IBM today announced that it is bringing Intel’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) to its Softlayer cloud service.

Intel’s TXT is a trust mechanism that is part of the Xeon processor, enabling administrators to place workloads on trusted pools of hardware. Karna Bojjireddy, lead architect for Cloud Security and Strategy at IBM, explained to eSecurityPlanet that Intel TXT technologies have been available for some time, but getting the technology properly deployed in the cloud takes effort.

“To enable this feature and Trusted Platform Module, BIOS-level settings need to be changed,” Bojjireddy said. “Softlayer has made changes to their Infrastructure Management System (IMS) to enable this feature through automation.”

Intel TXT is available today on SoftLayer bare metal servers with Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2, Xeon E3-1200 v3 and Xeon E5-4600 powered servers. Bojjireddy added that more SoftLayer bare metal server configurations will be available with the technology in the future.

While IBM is now officially out of the x86 server business, that is not impacting IBM Softlayer’s ability to use Intel silicon in the cloud. IBM completed a transaction this year to sell its x86 server division to Lenovo.

“Softlayer will continue using the servers they have been using, and this announcement doesn’t affect the IBM x86 servers,” Bojjireddy said.

Deploying Intel TXT isn’t just a checkbox item for IBM, but rather is intended to answer a critical security challenge. Bojjireddy said that cloud users are concerned about protecting workloads and data in the cloud as well as ensuring the trust and integrity of virtual machines launched in a cloud providers’ environment.

Read the Full Article: Source – eSecurity Planet
http://www.esecurityplanet.com/network-security/ibm-brings-bare-metal-intel-txt-security-to-cloud.html

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