NIST has released a preliminary draft of NIST Special Publication (SP) 1800-19B, Trusted Cloud: Security Practice Guide for VMWare Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Environments (Approach, Architecture, and Security Characteristics). This preliminary draft is stable but has some gaps in its content that will be addressed in the next draft. [A draft of Volume A, Executive Summary, was released in August 2018.]

The initial comment period for Volume B will close on January 11, 2019. See the publication details for links to the document and instructions for submitting comments.

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at NIST recognizes the need to address security and privacy challenges for the use of shared cloud services in hybrid cloud architectures, and has launched this project. This project is using commercially available technologies to develop a cybersecurity reference design that can be implemented to increase security and privacy for cloud workloads on hybrid cloud platforms.

This project will demonstrate how the implementation and use of trusted compute pools not only will provide assurance that workloads in the cloud are running on trusted hardware and are in a trusted geolocation, but also will improve the protections for the data within workloads and flowing between workloads. This project will result in a NIST Cybersecurity Practice Guide - a publicly available description of the solution and practical steps needed to implement a cybersecurity reference design that addresses this challenge.