In this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, we tackle the topic of why hardware security module (HSM) adapter technology, including HSM-as-a-service, is vital to ensuring general purpose and payment processing security across today’s multi-cloud environments. Marvell’s introduction of its LiquidSecurity 2 (LS2) solution builds upon the company’s well-established portfolio which is already proven at scale throughout the world’s largest hyperscale clouds. The new Marvell LS2 is designed to empower hyperscalers and cloud providers to develop HSM-as-a-service for secure key management, authentication, and encryption across a wide array of industry verticals.

My guest today is Amer Haider, VP Product Management Security Solutions Business Unit at Marvell Technologies, a top-tier semiconductor company. Amer is a new guest on this show, and shrewdly shares his insights and perspective on the direction of the HSM market segment and its vital role across multi-cloud environments.

For the foundation of our discussion, we addressed what is HSM technology, its origins, and why it provides essential encryption, key management, and authentication capabilities throughout today’s hyperscaler networks. From our perspective, HSM implementations are moving beyond on-premise implementations to hyperscaler and hybrid clouds.

Today, Marvell’s LS2 solution offers the high-performing cryptographic acceleration and processing, FIPS certification, including hardware-secured storage of up to one million encryption keys for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), RSA, and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) encryption, and 45 partitions, key to enabling robust multi-tenant use cases and boosting HSM adoption across multi-cloud environments.

Our conversation focused on the following:

• The invention of HSMs by Dr. Mohamed Atalia in 1972 and why HSMs are more secure than software, especially in keeping your keys safe.
• The biggest users of HSMs including especially include banks that use them for credit card purchases to assure secure transactions including user and merchant information.
• The challenges involved in broadening the adoption of HSMs including considerations such as encryption inertia (taking security for granted), costs of legacy on-premise implementations, and regulations related to data breaches.
• We examined how Marvell’s taking HSM to the cloud, i.e., HSMaaS, benefits the entire security ecosystem by lowering costs, expanding the market to include more SMB encryption support, and giving cloud service providers new revenue streams.
• How the Marvell LS2 solution builds on the success of the initial LiquidSecurity portfolio by providing advances such as delivering up to 120K ECC operations per second, tenfold increase in keys supported, and substantially lowering costs per key stored and per partition.
• How Marvell takes advantage of improvements in processing power to ease HSM adoption in clouds and key use case examples of how decision makers are using new LS2 capabilities to make the world a more secure place.