Intel and McAfee on Friday announced a broad new secure cloud computing initiative aimed at businesses that may be delaying cloud adoption because they're concerned about protecting sensitive data and meeting compliance obligations.
Intel acquired McAfee in 2010 for $7.68 billion.
The "holistic approach" to cloud security taken by the chip giant and its subsidiary is nothing if not ambitious, according to Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel's Cloud Infrastructure Group.
"In the next five years, our goal is to make cloud security as good as or better than traditional, best-in-class enterprise IT security," Waxman said at a meeting with reporters in San Francisco.
"Security is a barrier to cloud adoption," he added. "That's because a private cloud added to your IT infrastructure is like adding another door to your house—it's another entry point for bad guys to get in."
Intel and McAfee are taking a two-pronged approach to securing the cloud that combines hardware solutions, like Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) to identify "known good" servers, with software solutions, like McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO), to provide consistent security-policy management across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, Waxman said.
Other tools that are being offered as part of the companies' cloud security package for enterprises include McAfee's Management for Optimized Virtual Environments AntiVirus and Application Control software, two solutions for securing cloud data centers. Also included are connection security via the McAfee Cloud Security Platform, and device security provided by McAfee Deep Defender, DeepSAFE, and Cloud Identity Manager, which work in conjunction with Intel's baked-in hardware security features like Intel VT and Intel Cloud SSO.
Many of those technologies have actually been available to enterprise customers for a while, but Waxman said Intel and McAfee refrained from talking up their cloud security collaboration until they had a comprehensive vision for securing the cloud to present.
Greg Brown, McAfee's chief technology officer in charge of cloud and data center solutions, summed up the current state of cloud security and laid out the areas that Intel and McAfee plan to shore up with more robust cloud security.
Today's cloud is secured at the fundamental level by such layers as digital certification of authentic Web servers and external validation solutions like McAfee's SiteAdvisor Enterprise and Cloud Secure packages.
But Brown said several more evolving security layers exist. These include host integrity, as well as location and asset control, two hardware-specific security areas where Intel TXT is being positioned as the go-to tool.
There are also software-based solutions for what Intel and McAfee present as an integrated security stack for cloud computing. These include tools for gauging and validating the integrity of virtual machines, real-time cloud performance, software security, and endpoint awareness.
Building out that future cloud security stack would tie together the moving parts of the cloud—application consumers, intelligent devices, and IT administrators—to deliver secure computing across the servers, networks, and storage infrastructure that makes up the cloud, Brown said.
"We do believe we have a pathway to deliver that vision, to not only make cloud security as good as traditional best-in-class enterprise security but also to increase adoption of the cloud by businesses," he said.
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