Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s chip-based Trusted Execution technology is now being deployed by IBM in the highly regulated industries for coming to terms with their auditing and security compliance requirements, says a report from PCWorld. IBM is offering bare metal cloud servers with Intel Corporation’s Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) monitoring and security tools.
Intel TXT creates a chain of trust
Marc Jones, IBM SoftLayer chief technology officer said that TXT from Intel offers a “chain of Trust” from it’s to the organization’s internal auditing and compliance monitoring processes.
Jones added that TXT gives, “a validation that the device hasn’t been tampered with, and that there isn’t any man-in-the-middle spoofing.” Further, with the installation of the TXT, the company can offer a chain of trust to the customer’s on-premise environment to the SoftLayer environment, said Jones.
Intel TXT validations offer the security regulations solutions across all the industries ranging from healthcare, financial services and government organizations. TXT runs after verifying all the different components in a server right from the firmware to the operating system or hypervisor to check if these are genuine or if they have been exchanged with the duplicate component that could seize or change data and operations.
For deploying Intel TXT, customers using SoftLayer should switch to bare metal servers available with a Trusted Platform module (TPM) installed. After the server is deployed and authenticated, clients can build trusted computing pools through software Intel TXT.
Intel TXT tracks servers precise location
Intel has powered the TXT to recognise the precise location of the server through geolocational tracking, to ensure the customers that the cloud server is located where the SoftLayer is showing it to be.
There are government agencies that prefer their external cloud operation works within the ambit of their jurisdiction, and according to Jones it is possible to track the position of server in the cloud.
Intel TXT feature is available on SoftLayer bare metal servers, running on Intel Xeon E5-2600 V2, Xeon E5-1200-V3 or Xeon E5-4600. Additional Intel processors will be added as they are released.
How far TXT takes Intel Corporation’s success is still to be seen and tested as some of the new offerings from the company are providing higher-level capabilities right down to the chip level. Recently, the news came that the security vendor HyTrust also deployed the TXT technology to offer new data and application security functions to its customers.
