India is an interesting case as they are being attacked by foreign governments, or at least groups funded by them, so the need for military-grade defences is present not just for governmental concerns, but business too, which is where the Trusted Platform Module and related techniques come in. As Steve Hanna says:

So we need to have military-grade defense even in commercial places. Otherwise the APT [Advanced Persistent Threats] can creep into organizations and infect the systems. And generally it is very difficult to disinfect the machines later.

It may sound elemental, but implementing TNC implies that an organization must have some common minimum security criteria to apply, which surprisingly is not always the case.  This is where the integration with SCAP was so natural, as SCAP provides a standard set of criteria that is well defined and readily applicable to the TNC process.

I think it means that SCAP defines a collection of TNC rules (or a collection of TNC rules define a SCAP level), and Triumfant provide policies that describe the SCAP criteria, and their systems ensure that the policies are always enforced.

Some of the things being done with the specification are integrating network authentication with physical presence, tracking IT assets, and integrating legacy SCADA systems into the corporate network.

The TCG has also published a white paper on Cloud Computing and Security – A Natural Match, that discusses why you want a TPM in the cloud, and there has also been an extension to the IF-MAP protocol for Trusted Network Connect to support the Trusted Multi-Tenant Infrastructure Work Group.

"IF-Map is Facebook for endpoint devices," said Matt Webster, product management director at Lumeta and cochair of TCG’s Trusted Network Connect (TNC) workgroup, which developed the IF-MAP specification.

I’m not really sure how well that analogy works for me – if IF-MAP is Facebook, then what is Farmville? – but regardless, the rest of the article is a good read.

Please read the original article for the full story.

The basis will be NAC, Network Access Control, as:

With NAC you have endpoints (laptops, smartphones, desktops, printers) connecting to switches ad-hoc and in a transient fashion. Security must be coordinated between the stuff that runs on the endpoint (antivirus, policies and so on) and the stuff that needs to run in the network (firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention) while applying policies dynamically as each endpoint "arrives on the scene".

His NAC solution of choice is that from the Trusted Computing Group’s Trusted Network Connect architecture, which he reckons is a good fit for virtualisation and The Cloud in general.