IBM Cloud Computing Patent Aims to Eliminate the Cloud Security Barrier

The demand for cloud computing is strengthen when the companies have reached the awareness that they need to provide innovative IT services while reducing costs. The cloud model promotes investment in technology, allowing scheduling, provisioning, with a rapid and dynamic management of virtualized computing resources on demand.

IBM has supported thousands of clients around the world in the adoption of cloud-based IT models. It also runs every day millions of cloud transactions for companies in various industries such as banking, communications, healthcare and public administration, allowing companies to safely use cloud services business and infrastructure.

But, cloud security is still a major barrier for cloud adoption. Infonetics Research latest research forecasted that the managed cloud security market is expected to grow 45 percent over the next five years and will reach $9 billion due to increase in the volume, variety, and complexity of threats of all types.

IBM’s investment in research and development has produced a new method of securing data in cloud computing environments. The Big Blue company has been awarded a patent that will overcome barriers to adoption of cloud solutions by ensuring that client data is secured before transferring it for processing by cloud computing services.

IBM said its patent helps overcome security concerns by redacting, removing or replacing sensitive information from records. The sensitive information is then restore back when the records are returned from the cloud.

According to the abstract for the U.S. Patent #8,539,597: “Securing sensitive data for cloud computing”, a system and associated method for securing sensitive data in a cloud computing environment. A customer system has proprietary data as a record stored in a database. The customer system associates a hashing directive with the record prior to sending the data out to a cloud for computing services.

The hashing directive classifies each data field of the record into sensitive and transactional. The hashing directive controls a mode of hashing, either one-way hashing or two-way hashing for each sensitive data field associated with the hashing directive. A cloud receives the record secured according to the hashing directive and process the record to generate a result value for a cloud process result field of the record. The customer system reconstitutes the record according to the mode of hashing indicated in the hashing directive.

The new patent will help to deal with the security issues that is preventing enterprises to foray into cloud computing and it will help to install stronger security in cloud processing.

IBM hold the record number of patents for the year 2012. It has 300 patents related to big data and analytics innovations and technologies and 200 patents related to security, showing that the company is looking toward technology’s growing emphasis on security and privacy.

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