Virtustream accelerates Hybrid Cloud security and compliance

"Virtustream's partnership with Intel has been built on our common belief that enterprise class clouds must closely integrate software and hardware to give our clients the most advanced security features and compliance capabilities which reduce risk and costs,” said Kevin Reid, CEO and CTO of Virtustream. “By integrating Intel TXT, Virtustream’s xStream moves several steps ahead of any other hybrid cloud solution. The combination of application-level SLAs and security compliance gives our customers a tremendous advantage and new options for how they can deploy business-critical applications in the cloud."

Virtustream recently announced the general availability of their secure hybrid cloud solution, xStream 2.2. The solution is the first cloud management platform – available for private/hybrid/public clouds – to enable Intel TXT which provides secure, trusted resource pools for any application. xStream 2.2 complies with the latest Intel Attestation Service architecture, which virtually eliminates supply chain risks by ensuring that all computing resources can be identified, tracked and monitored to ensure that they are free from malware and viruses at the BIOS and hypervisor layers.

xStream software now enables geotagging and geofencing as described in NIST 7904 Guidance. Geotagging identifies the physical location of both hosts and virtual machines. This ensures that applications are always running in known, trusted locations within the data centre. GeoFencing creates a list of trusted locations where an application can run in a compliant manner. This ensures that applications are not improperly moved (via hypervisor live migration or operator error) to a non-compliant location within the data centre or another city/region/country.

Virtustream is the first cloud service provider and cloud management platform to satisfy the commercial and federal industry requirements for PII and workload locational compliance that can be configured, tracked and audited from the CPU silicon, through hypervisor, OS and virtual machines in private and hybrid clouds.

Virtustream xStream 2.2 has integrated the Intel TXT attestation framework with Virtustream xGRC, to ensure that tracking of all trusted resources can be integrated, managed and reported on with the relevant compliance frameworks (HIPAA, PCI, FedRAMP, ISO, FISMA, SSAE16). Since Intel TXT is attested to during boot up, this added security does not add any performance overhead to applications. Virtustream xStream provides this compliance through a simple GUI or via open API that can integrate with third-party orchestration tools or workflows.

"Enterprise clients have shown great interest in using Intel® TXT and Virtustream’s xStream workload orchestration software to increase workload integrity and compliance while addressing a wide range of workload sizes,” said Jason Waxman, vice president, Data Center Group at Intel. “With xStream, customers can take advantage of Intel TXT both on-premise and burstable into a secured public cloud which provides flexibility of where and when to deploy resources to meet new business needs."