Intel Corporation : Chip Shot: Intel and McAfee Outline Technologies to Make Cloud More Secure

News Fact Sheet

May 4, 2012 - Cloud computing adoption continues to gain momentum as companies aim to become more agile and efficient, and strive to manage the growth in users, devices and data traffic. In fact, by 2015, Intel Corporation expects that more than 3 billion connected users and
15 billion connected devices will be driving more than 1,500 exabytes of cloud traffic. Meanwhile, IDC estimates that about 20 percent of all digital data - or 1,400 exabytes - will be stored or processed in the cloud.
However, even as cloud adoption increases to keep up with this growth, security remains a top concern as businesses determine how to best protect sensitive data while also meeting a growing range of compliance requirements.
Today, Intel and McAfee provided insight into the security challenges facing IT as they consider cloud computing adoption, and discussed how they are helping businesses build new lines of defense through joint innovation and currently available solutions. The companies also outlined the areas that will have to be addressed in the future to make cloud computing safer and more secure.

IT Pain Points

To provide a deeper understanding of the issues facing IT, and how the industry can boost confidence in an organization's adoption of cloud computing via better security practices, Intel recently sponsored an in-depth surveyof IT professionals. Results showed that 61 percent of IT professionals are concerned about the loss of visibility in private clouds, 55 percent are concerned about lack of data protection in public clouds and 57 percent will not put data that require meeting specific compliance requirements into cloud datacenters. Respondents indicated that addressing these issues would enhance their confidence around security and accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in their companies.

The Solution: Intel and McAfee Joint Innovation

Together, Intel and McAfee are taking a holistic approach to address cloud security challenges and establish confidence in the use of private, public and hybrid clouds. The shared mission of Intel and McAfee is to enable worry-free cloud computing that is as secure as, or even more secure than, traditional, best-in-class enterprise IT security. Both companies are focused on

four areas to deliver better security for cloud environments while also enabling a broad range of open, interoperable security solutions via industry collaboration. These include securing cloud data centers, securing the network connections, securing the devices that connect to cloud services and accelerating the development of unified standards for cloud security.

Challenge: Today, IT managers have a high degree of control over their traditional enterprise data centers, which are bolstered by mature security tools and processes to monitor systems and perform necessary auditing to meet compliance requirements. With cloud infrastructure, IT equipment is typically virtualized and shared across multiple lines of business or even multiple organizations, resulting in reduced control of and visibility into the infrastructure security capabilities compared to traditional enterprise IT. These challenges are further amplified when using off-premise public cloud infrastructure which is managed by third parties. In addition, performing audits across private and public cloud data centers is complex, making it difficult to meet specific compliance requirements, thus lowering confidence in security.

Solution: Intel and McAfee's focus is on improving the integrity of the infrastructure while focusing on protecting data, and delivering capabilities to make it easier to audit cloud environments to meet compliance requirements. For example, McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee ePO)software provides consistent security-policy management across physical, virtual and cloud environments. Via custom integration, McAfee ePO software can be used to enforce policies in cloud data centers to determine, for example, whether Int el® Tr usted Ex ecuti on
Technolo g y ( Intel® T XT ) has been run or not. Intel® TXT is a hardware security solution that helps protect IT infrastructures against software-based attacks by validating the integrity of key components within an Intel® Xeon® processor E5 family-based server at startup. Other technologies available today include McA fee® M ana gement fo r Opti mi z ed Virtual Environments AntiVirus (McAf ee® MOVE AntiVirus) , which delivers improved anti-malware and threat protection performance and resource utilization for virtual desktops and servers, and McAfee Application Control, which proactively mitigates the risk of data breaches, targeted attacks and unplanned downtime through ensuring only authorized code runs.
Future Intel and McAfee developments are expected to broaden and strengthen data protection, security enforcement and auditability across cloud infrastructures.

Challenge: Two major concerns that companies have when considering cloud computing are the possibility of data loss and the ability to restrict access to information. Users with multiple or weak passwords are a potential security hazard, and the risks and costs associated with multiple passwords are particularly relevant for any large organization leveraging cloud-based applications. Meanwhile, email and Web traffic flowing between remote offices and mobile devices used by employees can be a significant source of data leakage.

Solution: The McAfee® Cloud Security Platformimproves security by protecting data, email, Web traffic and identities which are being transferred between devices and data centers.
With the McAfee Cloud Security Platform, IT departments can restrict information access by extending and applying access and security policies into the cloud. The McAfee Cloud Security
Platform takes advantage of the unique McAfee Global Threat Intelligence™ (McAfee GTI)technology to provide real-time protection against known and emerging threats. With visibility across all key threat vectors - file, Web, email and network - and a view into the latest vulnerabilities across the IT industry, McAfee correlates real-world data collected from millions of sensors around the globe to deliver the comprehensive protection for cloud connections.
In the future, the McAfee Cloud Security Platform will evolve to better protect cloud infrastructure via integrity assessments, provide asset control and protection, and enable broader auditing and network security capabilities.

Challenge: The explosive growth of devices, combined with trends such as "BYOD - Bring Your Own Device," is creating new challenges for cloud security. These include complex identity management in which employees are managing, on average, 12 user name/password combinations, new forms of malware and a growing range of online attacks requiring new and improved levels of security for devices accessing cloud services.

Solution: To reduce these risks, Intel and McAfee are improving security of devices, such as desktops and notebooks, by protecting data and restricting access to data and applications.

McAfe e® De ep De fende r , a joint solution developed by McAfee and Intel, represents the next generation of hardware-enhanced endpoint security. Enabled by McA fee® DeepS AFE™ technology, McAfee Deep Defender provides hardware-enhanced security that uses Intel® Virtuali z ati on Technology ( Intel® VT)built into Intel® Core® i3, i5 and i7 processors to detect and delete, in real-time, low-level threats that are difficult to detect with traditional operating system (OS)-based security techniques. To further enhance identity management across clouds,
McAfe e® Cl oud Id enti t y Mana ger , which is part of the McAfee Cloud Security Platform, provides on-premise, comprehensive software-based access control for cloud applications using enterprise identities, or Intel Cloud SSO(single-sign on) provides "identity as a service" solution in the cloud. Intel® Identity Protection Technology provides additional hardware-enhanced security technology that is difficult to tamper with and goes beyond user name and passwords to provide a second factor of authentication.
Future developments will focus on advancements in data and identity protection for devices accessing cloud services.

Intel and McAfee are engaged with several industry standards bodies, including the Cloud Security Alliance and Open Data Center Alliance, to accelerate more consistent cloud security standards. In addition, both companies are working with a broad range of systems and software providers to enable open, interoperable solutions for cloud security so that IT can more easily deploy solutions to strengthen cloud security. Through the Intel Cloud Builders program, more than 50 partners are collaborating with Intel and more than 130 hardware and software partners are delivering security solutions as part of the McAfee Security Innovation Alliance.

Now and Moving Forward

Intel and McAfee have a shared, multi-year mission to enable highly secure cloud computing over time to ensure that for any given workload running on any connected infrastructure, IT departments can know that: