IBM and AMD have announced the signing of a new multi-year joint development agreement that enhances and extends the security and artificial intelligence (AI) offerings of both firms.
The joint development agreement aims to expand this vision by building upon open standards, open-source software, and open system architectures. This will help drive a Confidential Computing in hybrid cloud environments and support a broad range of accelerators across enterprise-critical capabilities and high-performance computing (HPC) such as encryption and virtualization.
“The commitment of AMD to technological innovation aligns with our mission to develop and accelerate the adoption of the hybrid cloud to help connect, secure and power our digital world,” said Director of IBM Research, Dario Gil. “IBM is focused on giving our clients choice, agility and security in our hybrid cloud offerings through advanced research, development and scaling of new technologies.”
Mark Papermaster, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at AMD, said, “This agreement between AMD and IBM aligns well with our long-standing commitment to collaborating with leaders in the industry.” He added, “AMD is excited to extend our work with IBM on artificial intelligence, accelerating data center workloads, and improving security across the cloud.”
As per data from IBM’s Institute for Business Value, to secure highly sensitive data is still seen as a challenge for many companies. In the meantime, cybersecurity is amongst the top barrier in adoption and top criteria for selecting cloud providers.
Confidential Computing potentially eliminates the remaining obstacle to hybrid cloud adoption for highly regulated organizations or any company concerned with unauthorized third-party access to data in use in the public cloud, according to analyst firm Gartner.
Confidential Computing enabled by hardware allows the data associated with a running virtual machine (VM) to be encrypted, including while workloads are running. This enables would-be attackers and bad actors to prevent from accessing confidential information, even in the times of a break-in.
Confidential Computing for hybrid cloud unveils new potential for enterprise adoption of hybrid cloud computing, especially in regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and insurance.
After the agreement, AMD and IBM researchers are now jointly working on designing newly reformed activities.
Last month, IBM entered into a partnership agreement with ServiceNow with a vision to help companies lower costs and reduce operational risk after applying AI to automate IT operations.
Later this year, a new joint solution aims to combine IBM’s AI-powered hybrid cloud software and professional services to ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and market-leading IT service and operations management products.