AFORE Solutions Announces Cloudlink SecureVM Bitlocker Integration

AFORE Solutions (News - Alert), an Ottawa, Ontario, Canada based cloud security and data encryption management company, has announced that its Cloudlink SecureVM has been integrated with Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Bitlocker encryption software, making it easier to secure virtual machines.

“Enterprises see cloud security as a top priority, but data encryption solutions must leverage existing platforms and operating environments that are already in use in the organization," said Jonathan Reeves, AFORE chairman and chief strategy officer. "The CloudLink data security platform protects workloads at multiple layers, enabling businesses, healthcare organizations and governments to confidently reap the economic benefits of cloud adoption."

Bitlocker is a data encryption tool that Microsoft has built into the latest versions of its Windows operating system targeted at professional users. It typically uses hardware such as USB drives and Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) to store the encryption keys, but the Integration with Cloudlink allows administrators to keep the encryption keys in the cloud for Windows using Bitlocker and Linux virtual machines. Cloudlink will only let the machines boot if they haven’t been altered in some way.

Cloudlink offers virtual machine encryption for a number of popular cloud computing platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), Microsoft Azure and VMWare vCloud Hybrid service, as well as VM encryption for VMware VSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V private clouds. The encryption is intended to make deployments in multi-tenant environments more secure.

Bitlocker came to greater prominence when the maintainers of the popular open source disk encryption tool TrueCrypt abruptly ended development and advised Windows users to switch to Bitlocker in a tongue-in-cheek announcement. The sudden announcement caused a lot of consternation among security experts, with some of them wondering if it was a “warrant canary” alerting users that an agency like the NSA or FBI had somehow infiltrated the project.