Cisco, Intel push ‘trusted geolocation in the cloud’

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Ellen Messmer.

Cisco and Intel say that companies wanting to make use of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds should be aware that controls exist for keeping virtual workloads on servers within country borders. This idea of “trusted geolocation in the cloud” is of growing importance because many countries have laws about how can data about their citizens can be moved outside the country if at all, and businesses have their own reasons to restrict movement of data to certain places.

Cisco solutions architect Kenneth Stavinoha and Intel senior enterprise technologist Paul Yates recently spoke on the topic during a panel discussion at the ISC2 Conference in Chicago, along with HyTrust CTO Hemma Prafullchandra. The three advocated one type of geolocation method that can be set up through the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) security chip, which is based on a Trusted Computing Group standard…

“The decision to go to cloud is a risk,” said Stavinoha, so there’s a need for the enterprise to establish its own security controls. One way to do this is through hardware-based “root of trust” attestation via server-based TPM, he said. TPM can be used to confirm the location of a host, the integrity of the hypervisor platform, and make sure workloads only get deployed to cloud servers with trusted platforms. Several vendors, including Dell, HP and IBM, have hardware-based TPM enabled today in their products, Prafullchandra pointed out…

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