[Summary- As lakhs of organizations are evolving to store their data in the cloud, cloud security is rising as the talk of the town. Technologies are advancing with each passing week to protect delicate data. The fine of £746 million against Amazon in July 2021 has been the highest penalty so far. This was for not following General Data Regulation Protection or GDPR sincerely. Till now 1,163 fines have been issued from the year 2018. Cloud service providers i.e., CSPs have been trying to fix the highly-sensitive encrypted cloud data- such that no malicious code, software, or malware, & or even your Cloud Service Provider can access the encrypted data. And the technology behind fixing this is- Confidential Computing (CC).] 

What is Confidential Computing? 

Confidential Computing (CC) is an advanced cloud computing technology developed to protect especially the under-processing data. It protects the data by isolating it in a protected CPU region. This region will only be accessible to an authorized code/program. No other foreign programming code can access this sensitive data, through any points. 

Why Confidential Computing? 

What Alibaba says- Data breach can cause a loss in revenues & worse, your customers' confidence which is hard to re-establish. Numerous cases of Government ban on IT firms have been recorded across the globe for illegal data breaching activities.  Confidential Computing can offer security satisfying legislation, especially in the banking and healthcare sector. 

How Confidential Computing works? 

Let’s try to understand this technology in a simple way. Let’s say your company's sensitive data is encrypted into the cloud. To use this data, it must get decrypted first. This decryption makes data vulnerable to unauthorised (crime-intended) access. This can induce exploits -for example, memory dump, Direct Memory Access (DMA), etc. Here, Confidential Computing stops these attacks. The CC uses a hardware-based, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to prevent this attack. 

What is Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) here? 

TEE is a protected zone within a CPU. This region (also called enclave)is secured by embedded encryption keys & is available to only trusted, authorized application code.  The TEE model encrypts the data in the memory & halts the concerned operating system & cloud provider & its staff. The encryption data can only be decrypted by a trusted application program for its processing. This encryption couldn’t be decrypted easily by malicious code or ransomware. When an unauthorised code tries to access the decryption keys or let’s say, the trusted application code is hacked anyhow, the TEE will cancel the data processing instantly. 

What are the benefits of Confidential Computing 

The technology is useful but what will you get at the end of the day?- This is what perhaps you'd be thinking. The Confidential Computing tool offers many advantages to IT organisations. Let’s understand them one by one:  Generally, the cloud tools protect the data in rest or in transit (& not when it’s under-processing). While CC protects your data during its processing, too.This will ensure you to work on your sensitive applications, besides its safe storage & transfer.  The sensitive cloud data can be transferred between different environments or even from one cloud provider to another. This data transfer will be end-to-end encrypted with no third party exposure. This allows developers to build applications that can easily transit between cloud system without any leakage.  Many businesses use their own applications, ML algorithms, software, codes, and other intellectual property to process information- thus, take big deals & decisions. Confidential Computing will help you & the CTOs to process the data in a secured system that no one can invade easily.  You can explore new opportunities to work in collaboration with other businesses.  For example, two start-ups can work on different applications & data sets together without the involvement of each other’s secret data. It confirms zero exposure of your sensitive cloud data to them. And vice versa.  By eyeing Confidential Computing tools, business owners can choose which CSP is better for them-for secret data protection & storage.  Try to know which CSP can safeguard your sensitive buyers’ profile, financial database, encryption keys, or any other private applications better.   It also complies your data with legislation i.e., General Data Protection Regulation,  GDPR. As per Statista, cloud database security was valued at $7.23 billion & this is expected to hit $15.32 billion by the end of 2026. 

The Confidential Computing Consortium: 

Are you wondering how this idea came out? The story goes on like this: In 2019, a group of IT vendors (Google, Microsoft, IBM/Red Hat, Intel, Tencent, Alibaba, AMD, Baidu, Oracle, Swisscom.) together announced the formation of- the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) The Linux Foundation was the sponsor of the consortium. The CCC aims to develop open-source CC tools & to establish general rules in Confidential Computing. This club is to promote users to move through different IT environments. 

The conclusive lines 

Confidential Computing will help you to assure your stakeholders, employees, & more importantly, the clientele with data security. This is directly proportional to your monetary & integral growth. IT Giants across the globe are putting efforts to strengthen their market credibility. About Echelon Edge Echelon Edge Product Network Monitoring & Management Read Blogs