Microsoft and Google have made it official that their Virtual Machine instances on a respective note can now process highly sensitive information making it difficult for cloud admins to access or tamper information while in process. Also, the latest update will make it extremely difficult for hackers to induce malware into Trusted Executed Environments(TEE).
So, from now on government organizations and financial institutions can use Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engines without any apprehension that their data might be snooped by hackers or by those handling the operations in Cloud data centers.
Individual speaking about the newly induced technology, Azure Dcsc2- Series VMs which are now on general availability mode will now on function with Intel’s SGX or Software Guard Extensions running with hardware-based Trusted Execution Environments(TEE).
Technically speaking, TEEs are secure enclaves where information processing takes place in a separate memory located in the CPU away from the host operating system and hypervisors- thus making it difficult for data center administrators to access the processing info as it is encrypted while in rest and transit.
Speaking about Google Cloud Engine(GCE), the internet juggernaut has announced that it is making its Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and Shielded VM as a default for all GCE users for free.
While Shielded VM protects the guest Operating systems from malicious firmware, Kernel Compromise, and Persistent BOOT manipulation can be eradicated in guest OSes with the help of UEFI.
So, customers using CentOS, Core OS, Google Container Optimized OS, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server version, Windows Server, SQL Server, Debian, and RHEL can stay protected with Shielded VM.
Furthermore, all Managed Service for Microsoft AD, Kaggle, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud SQL server instances can also avail the services of Shielded VMs at zero cost.
