Cloud & Security Lab

Goal

The HP Cloud and Security Lab believes that cloud computing is going to change everything. The cloud is changing the way businesses, governments and consumers work, live, play and socialize.

That’s why we are working to make the cloud flexible, dynamic and scalable to meet the needs of the largest enterprise business, while being trustworthy and secure enough to meet even the toughest government requirements.

We endeavor to create an ‘Everything as a Service’ world where customers invest in the services they require taking away the complexity and large investments required with hardware procurement.

Research opportunities and challenges

Cloud

  • Enable HP to become a key player for cloud computing
  • Stress and validate individual technologies in systems contexts, creating service opportunities such as an HP Labs’ cloud computing infrastructure or a consumer domain such as gaming
  • Determine future cloud computing requirements and data center and application design principles

Securing the cloud

The continued growth of organized cybercrime, the deeper alignment of business and IT, the rapid adoption of social networking tools and cloud-based services, and the blurring boundary between personal and work life, all make security harder to understand yet increasingly important to everyone.

We are applying knowledge of mathematics, modeling, systems and security to enable safe participation in the online world. We are doing this in two ways:

  • creating new ways of thinking about security
  • designing and building infrastructure and tools

We focus on the challenges of:

  • understanding cyber-risk
  • how to model threats, security resources, controls and outcomes
  • how to deal with sophisticated attacks
  • how to automate security
  • building trusted infrastructures
  • what to monitor in terms of privacy
  • how to address assurance and privacy
  • service lifecycle management (service description, customization, deployment, adaptation, migration, and tear-down)
  • large scale cloud infrastructure

Research projects

Cirious

Developing foundational technologies needed to create an enterprise cloud software platform. Research areas in the lab include cloud-based and service-enabled applications; novel techniques for data center design and operations; and service-oriented IT.

G Cloud

Develop a cloud infrastructure with government grade security, while maintaining flexibility and efficiency and making sure that services are protected against future cyber attacks. HP Labs in Bristol have created a state of the art Innovation Theatre to house the demonstrator, where HP government and enterprise customers can come and brainstorm with HP Labs researchers to improve their understanding of the cloud.

EnCoRe

This 6-partner research collaboration, led by HP Labs, is investigating the role of consent lifecycle management as the basis for improved informational privacy, from the viewpoints of both the individual and the enterprise. Its vision is to make granting consent to the processing of personal information as easy and reliable as turning on a tap and revoking consent as easy and reliable as turning it off again. The project includes technical, business process, legal and social science research – see www.encore-project.info.

TrustCloud

TrustCloud addresses key issues and challenges in achieving a trusted cloud through the use of detective controls via technical and policy-based approaches. This project is led by HP Labs Singapore, in collaboration with HP Labs Bristol and ArcSight, Inc. For more information, please refer to our technical report.

Trust Domains

Trust Domains is a three-year, Technology Strategy Board and EPSRC funded collaborative project, looking to address the problems related to information sharing within the cloud. The project is looking at ways of deploying systems in which information can be shared in a trustworthy manner and where we can ensure the integrity and provenance of information as well as ensuring it is kept confidential yet available - we describe such a solution as a Trust Domain.

For more information please view our Trust Domains Project Overview.

Director: Martin Sadler