Highlights –

  • Nvidia works on solving the significant challenges in the tech stack and brings zero trust security into the picture.
  • CISO and CIO also created Zero Trust Maturity Model as a benchmark for security, which puts Nvidia’s latest technologies at the forefront.

Nvidia’s latest product strategy updates announced at the March 2022 GPU Technology Conference (GTC) last week reflect the high priority its DevOps and engineering teams are putting on reducing the gaps in data center cybersecurity. The gaps in cybersecurity tech stacks are growing because the supporting platforms were not designed for a zero-trust world.

The lack of platform and tech stack support makes implementing least-privileged access across data centers to the server level financially unattainable for many IT budgets. In addition, getting micro-segmentation accomplished for legacy servers and integrating Identity Access Management (IAM) takes much time on legacy tech stacks. Similarly, implementing Privileged Access Management (PAM) in the whole legacy infrastructure environment needs integration workarounds.

It’s hard to equip legacy tech stacks with the technology needed to support zero trust with top-down approaches. Nvidia’s product and solution strategies, unveiled at the GTC 2022, affirm that the company understands this aspect and is taking steps to solve complex tech stack challenges and, at the same time, improve market value.

Nvidia’s take on cybersecurity

Nvidia’s BlueField-2 DPU (currently in Beta), which supports VMware’s Project Monterey, reflects how ingrained the design goal of augmenting enterprise tech stacks is in their product strategy. For instance, the Nvidia Bluefield-3 DPU programmable data center infrastructure-on-a-chip is equipped with a public key accelerator, root-of-trust, security firmware updates, and Cerberus designed into their silicon and network platforms. All of these features work in sync to improve security. Specifically, the Monterey LaunchPad Beta is flexible in design to support micro-segmentation across data centers, which is essential to implement a zero-trust framework.

Also, Nvidia’s all-new Hopper GPU architecture and new H100 GPU, announced last week, have confidential security models working to secure the models and data. The new product also reinforces the company’s design objective, focusing on enabling zero trust across all products. Another feature is confidential computing, designed to safeguard AI models and customer data when in process.

During processing, confidential computing separates data in an encrypted area. The contents of the encrypted area, including data being processed, are accessible only to authorized programming code and are invisible to anyone else.

“We updated 60 SDKs (software development kits) at this GTC,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO “for our 3 million developers, scientists, and AI researchers and tens of thousands of startups and enterprises, the same Nvidia systems you run just got faster.”

National Standards creating benchmark for zero-trust security

Every CISO and CIO choose benchmarking approaches and assess how much a vendor reduces risk and secures their business. Ideally, organizations must benchmark how effective Nvidia is in assisting them in reaching their zero trust initiatives. Presently, an increasing base of new benchmarks and frameworks is being developed for CISOs, CIOs and their teams in this area.

A primary catalyst in driving the development of these essential benchmarks is the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee’s (NSTAC) report, Zero Trust and Trusted Identity Management.

Nvidia has expertise in finding gaps in the tech stack and new engineering solutions from silicon to SDKs to solve them. The company’s rapid advances in zero trust security are a case here. Nvidia DOCA 1.3 was launched last week at the GTC 2022, along with updates to 60 different SDKs to align the development efforts of startups, partners, and enterprises on the standardization of the AI platform.

Therefore, technologies like these are something that Nvidia will continue to strive to be on the forefront of that will assist enterprise leaders and security teams with adhering to and implementing national guidelines put down by the government entities.