Microsoft protects Azure with ‘confidential computing’

Microsoft has opened an access programme called ‘confidential computing’, which protects data from Azure security features.

The new service offers greater assurance to customers that avoid putting personal data in a public cloud, by encrypting data while in use, and is aimed at organisations in finance and health that need to share highly sensitive data.

Confidential computing focuses on hardware-based encryption, ensuring that data is required to be processed in the clear.

It also protects data against threats from malicious insiders with access to hardware, external attacks that exploit bugs in the OS, application, and hypervisor, and unauthorised third-party access.

Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure CTO, wrote in a company blog post: “Despite advanced cyber security controls and mitigations, some customers are reluctant to move their most sensitive data to the cloud for fear of attacks against their data when it is in-use.

“With confidential computing, they can move the data to Azure knowing that it is safe not only at rest, but also in use from [various] threats.”

Written by Leah Alger

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