New EMC Secure Cloud On-Boarding Solution

At the Intel Developer Forum 2012, EMC Corporation announced the EMC Secure Cloud On-Boarding Solution, offering service providers and enterprises with ingredients to securely migrate mission critical applications between public, private and hybrid clouds.

The solution, which will be available in early 2013, combines RSA Archer eGRC compliance and reporting software with Intel Corp.‘s TXT technology and EMC VPLEX virtual storage for secure end-to-end workload migration within and between data centers.

Migrating mission-critical applications without causing downtime for end users or applications remains a priority for service providers and enterprises deploying cloud infrastructures. The Secure Cloud On-Boarding Solution offers the components needed to do this quickly, securely and seamlessly. It does so by making sure the underlying hosts that virtual machines are running on are operating securely at multiple locations-and that regardless of what data center the workloads are migrated to, they will only run on trusted servers. Now Information Security Officers and Security Administrators will have an unprecedented view of the hardware trust status within a cloud infrastructure-regardless of location.

The EMC Secure Cloud On-Boarding Solution
offers solution providers and enterprises with:

• Policy and Compliance: RSA’s Solution for Cloud Security and Compliance, built on the Archer eGRC platform, offers compliance reporting for cloud environments with over 130 VMware specific control procedures. This allows customers to implement VMware security and policy management tied directly to regulations such as PCI and HIPAA. With the addition of the TXT control procedures to those already existing ones, security compliance is further enhanced by ensuring that the underlying servers running those virtual workloads have been verified against known good configurations, free of malware or rootkit hypervisors that typical runtime anti-virus applications might miss. By extending the compliance reporting to all data centers, these customers can gain a comprehensive high level view of their overall cloud compliance posture. This ensures that when a customer’s VMs are migrated, they are only moved to other trusted compute hosts within that cloud infrastructure environment.
• Data Mobility: VPLEX delivers storage federation and creates cooperating pools of storage resources. Federation enables IT to support the business through pools of resources that can be dynamically allocated. It enables dynamic, non-disruptive workload mobility between sites, allowing virtual distributed storage volumes to be created between multiple data centers, supports heterogeneous storage arrays and enables immediate data access. VPLEX eliminates the need to migrate data from one site to another when workloads need to move, because the data already resides at the site to which the workload is moving.
• Security: TXT is a built-in security capability that is part of many systems based on the Xeon processor E3, E5 and E7 families. It can help ensure that a system is not compromised with malware or rootkit hypervisors by establishing a hardware-based root of trust. This hardware-based security solution helps protect IT infrastructure against software-based attacks by validating the behavior of key components within a system at startup. Companies can securely realize operational efficiencies by making it easier to move virtual machines across clouds to trusted pools of ‘known good’ servers.

Jason Waxman, GM, Cloud Infrastructure Group, Intel, said: "The agility and efficiencies offered by cloud computing are attractive to IT decision makers, but security has been a major inhibitor for organizations moving their mission critical applications into a cloud. Intel is collaborating with EMC to strengthen cloud security and enable the VPLEX virtual storage component which is able to migrate workloads over distance to the cloud through its unique cache coherency technology, high data availability, and federation capabilities. We look forward to broad availability in early 2013, and continuing to work with EMC and RSA to enhance hardware-based security and compliance via Intel TXT with leading edge solutions."

Prasad Rampalli, SVP, Solutions Group, said: "Intel, EMC and RSA have collaborated to offer service providers and enterprises with the key components for building ‘bullet proof’ security in public, private and Hybrid clouds. Data security remains the #1 impediment to mission critical applications moving to the cloud. With today’s news, Intel, EMC and RSA are now offering technologies that-together-ensure non-disruptive and secure workload migration within and between data centers."

Manoj Nair, VP of Products Management, RSA, The Security Division of EMC, said: "Ensuring trust in the security of the underlying physical and virtual infrastructure is a pre-requisite for enterprises moving critical workloads to the cloud. We now have the ability to verify and report on the security compliance posture of servers in the virtual environment with the combined power of RSA Archer and Intel TXT. Together our companies are demonstrating that internal and external clouds can be secure, compliant, and auditable for the management of a company’s most important business processes."

Availability:
The EMC Secure Cloud On-Boarding Solution is being tested with select service providers and enterprises to pilot a formal solution that will be available in early 2013. VPLEX Metro is available. Availability of RSA Archer support for Intel TXT will be generally available early in 2013.