The two technology titans announced on Tuesday at the Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco that they’ve started a partnership to implement standards of security and efficiency, and for the overall improvement of cloud-based computing. The companies are intending to take the nascent technological concept to an enterprise-ready level.

Cloud computing is a way of using computer technology along with the Internet in order to provide software as a service, that is based on an infrastructure external to the client, and deliver the program’s output to the user over the network. A good example of this is Google Docs, a web application which functions as a word processor similar to what Microsoft Office does, only from a browser window.

Intel and Oracle are seeing the potential of cloud computing’s professional use, and therefore are proceeding to provide a measure of standards and security to the concept, with enterprise users in mind.

"Oracle understands that enterprises would like the flexibility of choosing to run their enterprise systems in either private or public clouds, but in order to do that, cloud computing needs to be highly efficient, secure and standards based," stated Robert Shimp, vice president of Oracle's technology business unit group.

The collaboration will be centered on marrying the Intel’s Virtualization Technology (VT) with Oracle grid computing solutions like the Oracle database, Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management, Application Grid, Enterprise Manager, and VM.

A key feature which will be thus enabled is what the companies are calling Trusted Computing; the technology, based on Intel’s VT, enables "hardware-rooted security" based on "new security features and capabilities into the processor, chipset, and other platform components," according to Intel. This will ensure private data can only be accessed by authorized applications, and that all activity will be tracked for purposes of auditing and compliance reporting. The companies will apply this technology with professional cloud computing solutions, ensuring the security of enterprises which rely on it.

"Enterprises running software in public clouds must have assurances that the environment is secure, private data can be accessed only by authorized applications, and activities are tracked for auditing and compliance reporting. Oracle and Intel will work together to further strengthen the security of virtual machines in a shared cloud environment to help ensure customer data is protected,” according to the statement made on Tuesday by both partners.

In helping with standardization, Intel and Oracle said that they will work with other companies to help develop provisioning and managing specifications for cloud-based systems, and would also help in developing standards for the portability of Virtual Machine images, like the Open Virtual Format.

Oracle is also expected to create a similar partnership to integrate the hardware security technology of Intel’s main rival company, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).