Creating Confidence in the Cloud

In every industry, we continue to see a transition to the cloud. It’s easy to see why: the cloud gives companies a way to deliver their services quickly and efficiently, in a very agile and cost-effective way.

Financial services is a good example — where the cloud is powering digital transformation. We’re seeing more and more financial enterprises moving their infrastructure, platforms, and software to the cloud to quickly deploy new services and new ways of interacting with customers.

But what about security? In financial services, where security breaches are a constant threat, organizations must focus on security and data protection above all other cloud requirements.

This is an area Intel is highly committed to, and we offer solutions and capabilities designed to help customers maintain data security, privacy, and governance, regardless of whether they’re utilizing public, private, or hybrid clouds.

Here’s a brief overview of specific Intel^® solutions that help enhance security in cloud environments in three critical areas:

• Enhancing data protection efficiency. Intel^® AES-NI are instructions in the processor that accelerate encryption based on the widely-used Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm.  These instructions enable fast and secure data encryption and decryption, removing the performance barrier to allow more extensive use of this vital data protection mechanism. With this performance penalty reduced, cloud providers are starting to embrace AES-NI to promote the use of encryption.
• Enhancing data protection strength. Intel^® Data Protection Technology with AES-NI and Secure Key is the foundation for cryptography without sacrificing performance. These solutions can enable faster, higher quality cryptographic keys and certificates than pseudo-random, software-based approaches in a manner better suited to shared, virtual environments.
• Protecting the systems used in the cloud or compute infrastructure. Intel^® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel® TXT) is a set of hardware extensions to Intel^® processors and chipsets with security capabilities such as measured launch and protected execution. Intel TXT provides a hardware-enforced, tamper resistant mechanism to evaluate critical, low level system firmware and OS/Hypervisor components from power-on. With this, malicious or inadvertent code changes can be detected, helping assure the integrity of the underlying machine that your data resides on. And at the end of the day, if the platform can’t be proven secured, the data on it probably can’t really be considered secured.

Financial services customers worldwide are using the solutions to provide added security at both the platform and data level in public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments.

Putting It into Practice with our Partners

At Intel^®, we are actively engaged with our global partners to put these security-focused solutions into practice. One of the more high-profile examples is our work with IBM. IBM is using Intel TXT to deliver a secure, compliant, and trusted global cloud for SoftLayer, its managed hosting and cloud computing provider. When IBM SoftLayer customers order cloud services on the IBM website, Intel TXT creates an extra layer of trust and control at the platform level. We are also working with IBM to offer Intel TXT-enhanced secure processing solutions including VMware/Hytrust, SAP, and the IBM Cloud OpenStack Services.

In addition, Amazon Web Services (AWS), a major player in financial services, uses Intel AES-NI for additional protection on its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service instances. Using this technology, AWS can speed up encryptions and avoid software-based vulnerabilities because the solution’s encryption and decryption instructions are so efficiently executed in hardware.

End-to-End Security

Intel security technologies are not only meant to help customers in the cloud. They are designed to work as end-to-end solutions that offer protection — from the client to the cloud. In my previous blog, for example, I talked about Intel^® Identity Protection Technology (Intel^® IPT), a hardware-based identity technology that embeds identity management directly into the customer’s device. Intel IPT can offer customers critical authentication capabilities that can be integrated as part of a comprehensive security solution.

It’s exciting to see how our technologies are helping financial services customers increase confidence that their cloud environments and devices are secure. In my next blog, I’ll talk about another important Intel^® initiative: data center transformation. Intel^® is helping customers transform their data centers through software-defined infrastructures, which are changing the way enterprises think about defining, building, and managing their data centers.

Mike Blalock

Global Sales Director

Financial Services Industry, Intel

This is the seventh installment of the Tech & Finance blog series.

To view more posts within the series, click here: Tech & Finance Series