Intel, Oracle team on encryption to protect data in business 'clouds'

Judging from the announcement at this week's OracleWorld, both enterprise cloud computing and virtualization customers could soon get new data encryption technologies that are "hardware-rooted."

Oracle and Intel are now working together on enterprise computing "clouds" that will use data encryption for improved privacy, the two companies said at this week's OracleWorld conference.

Data encryption was mentioned as part of a larger agreement which also calls for collaboration around greater database performance for corporate clouds and mutual work on Web standards for cloud provisioning and management, as well as on the Open Virtual Format (OPF) for porting virtual machine images across platforms.

The collaboration will revolve around Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) and Oracle Grid Computing technologies such as Oracle's database, Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management, Application Grid, Enterprise Manager, and VM.

Mutual customers are already using both sets of technologies, the companies said in a statement on Tuesday.

Although officials with knowledge of the two companies' plans were temporarily unavailable to elaborate on Wednesday, the announcement by Intel and Oracle seems to hint that Intel's Trusted Computing for Execution Platform could be an important part of the privacy push.

"Enterprises running software in public clouds must have assurances that the environment is secure, private data can be accessed only by authorized applications, and activities are tracked for auditing and compliance reporting. Oracle and Intel will work together to further strengthen the security of virtual machines in a shared cloud environment to help ensure customer data is protected," according to the statement.

"As Intel develops new virtualization security features to ensure trusted environments for cloud computing, Intel and Oracle will optimize this technology on Oracle software. Both companies will continue to better integrate their data encryption technologies to help ensure data privacy and security in shared public cloud environments."

Trusted Computing -- which is part of Intel's VT platform -- provides "hardware-rooted security" by integrating "new security features and capabilities into the processor, chipset, and other platform components," says a white paper on Intel's Web site.

The two companies also noted in this week's announcement, though, that their recent work on using VT and Oracle VM and the open source Xen hypervisor has brought a 17% boost in performance for Oracle database running virtualized on Intel Xeon processors.

Intel had previously contributed modifications to Xen in support of its VT-x architecture extensions. Intel is also part of the Xen Project Advisory Board (Xen AB), along with IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, and XenSource owner Citrix.

In related news this week, two US states mandated that businesses use encryption to protect customer data for consumers living in those states.