Trend Micro brings encryption to the cloud

Vendor launches new service to encrypt data in cloud-computing environments

Trend Micro is blazing a new trail with a service called SecureCloud intended to give enterprises a way to encrypt data in cloud-computing environments.

SecureCloud allows you to maintain control over the encryption key used to secure data stored in the Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus or VMware vCloud cloud infrastructures. Other cloud-computing variants could be added in the future.

"IT operations may be firing up [a remote virtual machine] image but we have security validating the integrity, and it's encrypted until it hits the cloud, and it's encrypting data at rest," according to Todd Thiemann, senior director of data center security and marketing at Trend Micro.

He notes that SecureCloud allows the IT department using either public or private cloud-computing services to answer the basic questions, "Is this image OK? And is it mine?"

Now in beta with general availability expected by year end, SecureCloud is provided through a website portal and makes use of policy-based encryption to allow access to a virtual-machine image as well as storing related activity logs.

In addition to offering the security service, Trend Micro is looking at making comparable software available to companies for on-premises use.

In a separate announcement, Trend Micro also unveiled an antimalware protection module for its VMware server security software, Deep Security 7.5. It includes integrity monitoring, log inspection and stateful firewall capabilities, and leverages the most recent VMware vShield Endpoint APIs. Trend Micro Deep Security 7.5 is expected to ship in October.