Protection of Data on Cloud with Confidential Computing

By Cloud Computing Outlook | Sunday, August 30, 2020

The Confidential Computing Consortium, a group for the protection of data on the cloud, has proposed and developed confidential computing to allow organizations to safeguard their data better

FREMONT, CA: Confidential computing is a concept that includes encrypted data processing in memory to control access to ensure data protection. It is a concept that is encouraged by Confidential Computing Consortium—a group of organizations, which builds tools that support data protection, more specifically suited for public clouds. This feature also focuses on software and hardware-based security and ensures that data is secured and encrypted against malicious insiders and vulnerabilities of the network.

The idea of confidential computing is gaining importance as the cloud services are becoming more and more popular with each day. Organizations that utilize cloud computing environments are capable of leveraging more benefits due to the increased sense of security provided by confidential computing.

The Confidential Computing Consortium, which is aiming to design a cross-platform tool for confidential computing, are largely contributing to and defining confidential computing. The consortium also aims to simplify the process of running computations in something called enclaves—a trusted execution environment (TEE)—protected from OSs, hardware, and other applications.

Many prominent hardware vendors, cloud providers, and developers, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, ARM, Alibaba, Red Hat, and many others, make up the consortium. This group has the goal of designing and supporting open-source tools and frameworks for cloud computing environments. Equipped with the aims to support community-based projects, the consortium is focused on providing service for protecting applications, programs, and virtual machines (VMs). The consortium vows always to come to aid other organizations while dealing with any confidential security changes.

As a cherry on top, the Confidential Computing Consortium has also developed a framework that is a general structure used to construct secure and highly available applications.

Uses of Confidential Computing:

Confidential computing can be applied anywhere for the protection of data in trusted environments. Following are some of its use cases

• Protection of data from malicious attacks.

• Ensure data compliance with legislation such as GDPR.

• Verify the safety of data in cases like financial data, encryption keys, or any other data that requires protection.

• Data in use should always be protected while the migration of workloads to different environments is being carried out.

• Allow coders to develop portable applications for different cloud platforms.