Cloud computing is one of the fastest-growing markets, and as such many high-end businesses are looking forward to eating a piece of this pie. Recently, AMD and IBM announced a multi-year partnership targeting the growing Computing cloud sector.
Chips from AMD’s rival, Intel Corporation, are already employed in this sector. However, AMD and IBM plan to develop solutions in overcoming the last hurdle in adopting cloud computing by companies mindful of their data security.
Data security for cloud computing has three sub-areas. When the data is stored, when it is being transferred, and when it is being processed. Ensuring storage and share security is vital as cloud users have often expressed concerns about when this data is being processed.
When processing is taking place, standard security processes such as encryption need to be removed. It results in information that is present in a processor’s memory being vulnerable to malicious access.
AMD and IBM’s partnership will focus on open-source software, standards, and architecture. Their collaboration also targets HPC accelerators, encryption, and virtualization. They aim to solve data security during processing by implementing hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). It cannot be accessed by the operating system and is encrypted.
AMD’s Epyc processors feature Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEVto generate encrypted keys for data protection. Google also announced that it would use AMD’s second-generation Epyc processors for its Confidential Virtual Machines.
The involved party cannot view the keys in virtual computing. When using AMD chips, corporations do not have to tweak their workloads to work with SEV.
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