IBM, Intel Now Provide SoftLayer Security 'Down to the Chip Level'

IBM (IBM) SoftLayer cloud platform is now offering Intel (INTC) cloud technology bare metal servers that provide monitoring and security down to the microchip level.

Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) is designed to protect virtualized data centers’ hybrid, private and public clouds against attacks toward hypervisor and BIOS, firmware and other pre-launch software components. It also delivers hardware monitoring and security controls to ensure that a workload from a known location on the SoftLayer infrastructure is running on trusted hardware.

“Security perception remains the biggest hurdle for widespread enterprise cloud adoption,” SoftLayer Chief Technology Officer Marc Jones said in a prepared statement. “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.”

Rick Echevarria, vice president of the Intel Security Group, noted Intel TXT can help SoftLayer customers better secure their data in the cloud.

“With this solution based on Intel TXT, SoftLayer is demonstrating that [new] levels of cloud security are now possible and available,” he added.

Intel TXT supports enterprises in multiple industries

IBM said enterprises in several industries can benefit from Intel TXT, including:

Intel TXT allows customers to build trusted computing pools of IT resources in the cloud with an extra level of visibility and control, according to IBM.

This technology verifies the components of a computing system from its operating system or hypervisor all the way to its boot firmware and hardware. Hybrid cloud solutions also can leverage partner software and Intel TXT to limit data decryption to specific geo-located servers.

IBM said it expects more SoftLayer bare metal server configurations with Intel TXT to be available in the future.

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