Earlier this year, Microsoft announced plans for secured-core servers, the server complements to secured-core PCs. Today, December 7, the first servers that have passed the "Secured-core" standards bar are available to customers.

Customers interested in the new secured-core servers can find listings for them in the Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI catalogs. HPE's Gen 10 Plus (v2) products for Azure Stack HCI 21H2 get the secured-core designation. Dell, HPE, Lenovo, AMD and NEC have a variety of server products running Windows Server 2016, 2019 and/or 2022 that get the secure-core checkmark.

Secured-core servers use the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 and secure boot to make sure only trusted components load in the boot path.

As the name implies, secured-core servers are designed to help protect against threats that commonly target servers, such as ransomware and exploits around cryptocurrency mining. Microsoft officials said that secured-core servers protect server infrastructure with a hardware root of trust, defend sensitive workloads against firmware-level attacks, and prevent access and execution of unverified code on systems.

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