NIST, Consortium Launch Project to Secure Cloud Workloads; Dell EMC’s Cameron Chehreh Quoted

The National Institute of Standards and Technology and a consortium of technology companies have teamed up to build a “trusted cloud” platform that seeks to demonstrate how credible compute pools that leverage commercial systems can offer security capabilities, MeriTalk reported Monday.

“These capabilities will not only provide assurance that cloud workloads are running on trusted hardware and in a trusted geolocation or logical boundary, but also will improve the protections for the data in the workloads and data flows between workloads,” according to a draft document on NIST’s Trusted Cloud program.

Consortium members that work with NIST through the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence include IBM, Gemalto, HyTrust and Dell Technologies’ subsidiaries VMware, RSA and Dell EMC.

Cameron Chehreh, chief technology officer at Dell EMC’s federal business, commented on NIST’s establishment of NCCoE and move to work with the consortium to help assess sets of security controls in the lab and develop a “manufactured-secure” platform.

Chehreh noted that cloud service providers perform well when it comes to marketing “but working with customers on being prescriptive on how to deal with cybersecurity issues and the ability to operationalize the cloud, is fundamentally different.”