IBM announced that SoftLayer will be the first cloud platform to offer its customers bare metal servers powered by Intel Cloud Technology that provides monitoring and security down to the microchip level.
Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT) provides 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 and mission-critical operations to the cloud.
These new security capabilities put IBM at the forefront of security innovation helping organizations develop solutions around areas such as governance, compliance, audit, application security, privacy, identity and access management and incident response. IBM will also be offering services to help customers implement this new capability into their applications and platforms.
“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 is especially advantageous for large enterprises subject to compliance and audit regulations, such as healthcare, financial services and government organizations. It helps ensure that trusted resources can be integrated, managed and reported on with the relevant compliance frameworks (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP, ISO, FISMA, 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.