This post was jointly written by Stephen Spector, Dell Cloud Evangelist & Dave Asprey, Trend Micro Virtualization and Cloud Evangelist
The user’s going to pick dancing pigs over security every time. — Bruce Schneier
In order for enterprise IT organizations to adopt public and hybrid clouds, a cloud service provider’s security controls must meet or exceed the standards set forth by the organizations themselves. In addition to Dell’s world-class cloud security provided by Dell SecureWorks, Dell has partnered with Trend Micro to provide an incremental level of security encryption technology through Trend’s SecureCloud Solution.
From the initial planning and design stage, product managers and engineers from both companies have collaborated to ensure that security is “built-in” for the public vCloud DataCenter solution. Having security features designed in from the start, allows Dell to not only provide a secure, enterprise public cloud, but also mitigates the security fears/risks of migration and/or extension of an organization’s existing environment into the vCloud DataCenter solution. As data encryption is a crucial part of any data privacy and compliance program, the lessons learned from this process will be leveraged to provide Dell’s next generation of community clouds for verticals such as healthcare, education, and federal.
Encryption key management in the cloud simply doesn’t work the way it does in enterprise data centers. Most companies do encrypt at least some of their critical data in the cloud, but they leave holes when it comes to encryption key management in the cloud. This is unacceptable especially in highly regulated environments.
The trend micro secure cloud encryption key management service helps Dell vCloud DataCenter customers to have the highest levels of data security by enabling the most effective cloud key management techniques. With secure cloud, Dell customers can set policies that define when an encryption key will be released from Trend Micro’s secure key management solution. This new layer of data security prevents cloud specific security problems such as an illegally copied Virtual Machine Image containing credentials that could compromise a key server.
It also provides a way of proving data destruction. IT auditors often look for ways to prove that data was destroyed in accordance with policy. In a cloud solution, however, data moves from drive to drive and it is very difficult to show physical destruction of the drives. By making sure data is encrypted all the time using secure keys, IT managers from verticals such as healthcare, education, and federal can rest assured that their data is effectively secured and that they will be able to show an auditor that there is no existing copy of regulated data on a cloud that shouldn’t be there.
Together, Dell and Trend Micro have created a secure cloud to meet the critical security demands of enterprise customers. To learn more, visit the Dell vCloud DataCenter website at http://dell.to/sK9h7I or Trend Micro’s cloud security site at http://www.trendmicro.com/us/enterprise/challenges/cloud-virtualization/index.html.