Companies partner to secure cloud

RSA, VMware, Intel and Archer Technologies, will work together to build a trusted cloud infrastructure, according to Server Watch.

The focus is primarily on the private cloud, essentially the virtualised data centre. The companies will provide a hardware root of trust, a secure virtualisation environment, security information and event management, and GRC management software.

The process will enable customers to see what is going on within physical and virtual machines and verify secure conditions in the cloud.

Supercomputer maker Cray's custom engineering group partnered with Microsoft Research to look into lowering the costs of running cloud computing data centres, reports ZDNet.

The initiative will make use of the HPC specialist's intellectual property in system design, including high-density packaging. The partners will work on efficient power delivery and cooling innovations, with the aim of reducing facility, power and hardware costs.

"The results of the project have the potential to deliver significant cost savings for operating a cloud computing data centre," says Cray vice-president of custom engineering, Chuck Morreale.

SafeNet is offering technologies that help enterprises securely store and access information held in third-party data centres, states PC World.

“With companies shifting computing to vendor-hosted data centres, there new challenges for how information is stored, moved and accessed,” says Peter Schill, SafeNet's director of channel sales.

SafeNet's strategy focuses on access control and encryption. The technology in one of the products, intelligent authentication tokens, comes from SafeNet's acquisition in January 2009 of Aladdin Knowledge Systems. The tokens allow administrators to assign certain policies and access rights to different pieces of data.