AMD and IBM have announced a multi-year joint development collaboration to enhance and extend the security and AI offerings of both companies.
To demonstrate how the coming together of the two will impact computing, the duo also announced the development of a prototype that’ll run an OpenShift instance that’s encrypted and secured at the hardware level using AMD’s SEV (Secure Encrypted Virtualization) extension.
The prototype is part of their joint initiative to enable Confidential Computing to push the adoption of the hybrid cloud.
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Throwing down the gauntlet
Confidential Computing calls for encrypting data that’s in-use to guarantee the safety of confidential information even when a system has been compromised.
With the announcement IBM suggests it is leveraging AMD’s SEV extensions to encrypt the data running inside a virtual machine, particularly in an OpenShift instance.
This allows it to extend the benefits of Confidential Computing to hybrid clouds. IBM reasons that this will help it tap regulated industries such as finance, healthcare and insurance, as cybersecurity is currently the top barrier for adoption as well as the top criteria for selection of cloud providers, according to data from IBM’s Institute for Business value.
Running OpenShift in a hardware encrypted virtual machine is just the first step as Mark Papermaster, executive vice president and CTO, AMD says that the partnership will “extend our work with IBM on AI, accelerating data center workloads, and improving security across the cloud.”
Going forward, expect the collaboration to extend to other aspects of computing as well, and perhaps even signal similar partnerships between other software and hardware vendors.
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