Global Research Collaboration Explores Trust and Assurance in Cloud Computing Environments

HOPKINTON, Mass. - June 10, 2008 -

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, today announced its participation in the Daoli Trusted Infrastructure Project, a global research collaboration on trust and assurance in cloud computing environments. EMC joins a growing global research team that today includes four of China’s leading technical universities including Fudan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Tsinghua University, and Wuhan University.

The project explores trust and assurance issues that are becoming increasingly important to enterprises as they entrust their applications and data—and their customers’ data—to computing environments outside of their local control. As companies begin to leverage virtualization within and beyond their data-centers, the virtualized computers, networks, and storage platforms become components in a multi-tenant environment.  This multi-tenancy and portability make providing security challenging.  This research work is an exploration of techniques that could be applied to secure both the underlying physical plant as well as broadly shared resources.

Project participants will share their discussions of research-in-progress with researchers worldwide by way of a wiki, which is hosted by Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Their goal is to generate a knowledge-base of best practices and answers to questions about trusted information infrastructures. It is the first public research collaboration environment to be connected to the EMC Innovation Network, EMC’s global research program launched one year ago.

“The team is exploring the convergence of several key technologies including cloud computing, trusted computing, and virtualization, and looking at how they might be applied to provide high assurance software environments inside and outside the enterprise,” said Burt Kaliski, Director, EMC Innovation Network. “The Daoli Project will help us understand what our customers are likely to encounter in the future. We look forward to sharing the knowledge this research will generate.”

Later this year, the project’s research area will be explored in detail as part of the 3rd Annual Asia-Pacific Trusted Infrastructure Technologies Conference (APTC 2008), an academic research workshop being held October 14-18, 2008 (http://grid.hust.edu.cn/aptc08/) in China.

The Daoli Project was showcased at EMC World 2008 in Las Vegas in May as part of the EMC World Innovation Showcase Pavilion, an interactive exhibit highlighting the latest in EMC research and development.