From San Francisco, VMworld 2013, John Furrier and Dave Vellante speak with Iddo Kadim, Marketing Director, Data Center Group with Intel Corporation. Kadim’s team develops solutions with the ecosystem in order to expose Intel’s technologies in ways that deliver value for IT, particularly in the areas of virtualization and security.

With all the hype around virtualization, people tend to forget that all these platforms run on physical infrastructure. Intel has an initiative called “Trusted Compute Pools,” based on Intel Trusted Execution Technology.

The lack of visibility of infrastructure in the cloud is the problem this initiative aims to address. “With Intel TXT, you can get measurement and knowledge that the platform (hardware, firmware and hypervisor) are actually a known-good that you intended to run there, and that can be used as a foundation of trust. Further on, you can promulgate all this into a management tool which, instead of managing an unknown cloud entity, you get to manage a trusted server. It’s still a virtual, logical entity, but it’s tied to known information about the infrastructure,” explains Kadim.

Until now, there haven’t been many practical approaches that could examine the cloud service’s virtualization from a security perspective, and the visibility into the lower layers of cloud infrastructures was almost absent. Intel TXT is a set of enhanced hardware components designed to build and maintain a chain of trust that protects sensitive information from software-based attacks.

Vellante agreed, stating that many practitioners are more familiar with the physical world of ports and hardware, and in the virtualized world they are just lost.
To simplify their work, Kadim said that “through the VMware stack, we can create that trusted foundation on any server that ships today.”

Furrier asked Kadim to differentiate between the hybrid cloud and the private cloud. Kadim recognizes it as a confusing topic but explains: “Private is about the ownership of the data and the virtual infrastructure.” Furrier adds that this involves no multi-tenancy. “Many people associate Private with being on-premises,” says Kadim. “It’s an infrastructure that’s physically owned by the tenant. Hybrid is when you combine that with a third-party hosted infrastructure.”

According to Kadim, “Software-defined infrastructure will be, at the endgame, the equivalent of a self-driving car.”

See the entire interview with Kadim below: