Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Google has announced the launch of Cloud Key Management Service (KMS), which enables admins to manage their encryption keys in Google Cloud Platform without maintaining an on-premise management system. The news marks Google’s entry into this particular security arena, following Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft who launched such initiatives as far back as 2014 and 2015 respectively.

“Customers in regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, value hosted key management services for the ease of use and peace of mind that they provide,” wrote Maya Kaczorowski, Google Cloud Platform product manager in a blog post. “Cloud KMS offers a cloud-based root of trust that you can monitor and audit...

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jordan Novet.

Microsoft is moving right along in its efforts to maintain a leading position in the public cloud market. Today the company is announcing a public preview for a new service for storing cryptographic keys in the Azure cloud — and it’s rolling out the G-Series of virtual machines for running applications.

New virtual machines, each of which is a sliver of a physical server in a Microsoft data center, are par for the course in the highly competitive cloud business, where it’s only natural for computing power to increase over time. The new Key Vault service, for its part, could be interpreted as Microsoft’s answer to the Key Management Service, which cloud market leader Amazon Web Services announced last year to manage keys, and Amazon’s older CloudHSM service, which provides dedicated gear called hardware security modules (HSMs) for key storage...

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jeff MacMillan.

Despite offering tremendous benefits in convenience, elasticity, transparency, and economy, cloud computing faces a major stumbling block: security. Because cloud computing is well established, many assume that all critical aspects of cloud security are already in place. With 54 percent of U.S.-based organizations using the cloud and more enterprises migrating their data to the cloud, it might be surprising to some that the management of the keys to access encrypted cloud-based data — an important part of cloud security — is hardly up to snuff.

Several cloud providers offer encryption capabilities, directly or indirectly, that can be applied to the cloud. However, today’s approach to key management comes with an inherent security risk, that of key ownership and storage. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) recommends a separation of “lock and key” in the cloud and various compliance regulations are likewise beginning to address this fundamental cloud security issue...