What is confidential computing? How can you use it?
What is confidential computing? Can it strengthen enterprise security? Nelly Porter, Senior Product Manager, Google Cloud and Sam Lugani, Lead Security PMM, Google Workspace & GCP, answer these and other questions in this Help Net Security interview.
How does confidential computing enhance the overall security of a complex enterprise architecture?
We’ve all heard about encryption in-transit and at-rest, but as organizations prepare to move their workloads to the cloud, one of the biggest challenges they face is how to process sensitive data while still keeping it private. However, when data is being processed, there hasn’t been an easy solution to keep it encrypted.
Confidential computing is a breakthrough technology which encrypts data in-use – while it is being processed. It creates a future where private and encrypted services become the cloud standard.
At Google Cloud, we believe this transformational technology will help instill confidence that customer data is not being exposed to cloud providers or susceptible to insider risks.
Confidential computing has moved from research projects into worldwide deployed solutions. What are the prerequisites for delivering confidential computing across both on-prem and cloud environments?
Running workloads confidentially will differ based on what services and tools you use, but one thing is given – organizations don’t want to compromise on usability and performance, at the cost of security.
Those running Google Cloud can seamlessly take advantage of the products in our portfolio, Confidential VMs and Confidential GKE Nodes.
All customer workloads that run in VMs or containers today, can run as a confidential without significant performance impact. The best part is that we have worked hard to simplify the complexity. One checkbox—it’s that simple.
What type of investments does confidential computing require? What technologies and techniques are involved?
To deliver on the promise of confidential computing, customers need to take advantage of security technology offered by modern, high-performance CPUs, which is why Google Cloud’s Confidential VMs run on N2D series VMs powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors.
To support these environments, we also had to update our own hypervisor and low-level platform stack while also working closely with the open source Linux community and modern operating system distributors to ensure that they can support the technology.
Networking and storage drivers are also critical to the deployment of secure workloads and we had to ensure we were capable of handling confidential computing traffic.
How is confidential computing helping large organizations with a massive work-from-home movement?
As we entered the first few months of dealing with COVID-19, many organizations expected a slowdown in their digital strategy. Instead, we saw the opposite – most customers accelerated their use of cloud-based services. Today, enterprises have to manage a new normal which includes a distributed workforce and new digital strategies.
With workforces dispersed, confidential computing can help organizations collaborate on sensitive workloads in the cloud across geographies and competitors, all while preserving privacy of confidential datasets. This can lead to the development of transformation technologies – imagine, for example, being able to more quickly build vaccines and cure diseases as a result of this secure collaboration.
How do you see the work of the Confidential Computing Consortium evolving in the near future?
Google was among the founding members of the Confidential Computing Consortium, operating under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation to facilitate adoption of confidential computing.
Cloud providers, hardware manufacturers, and software vendors all need to work together to define standards to advance confidential computing. As the technology garners more interest, sustained industry collaboration such as the Consortium will be key to helping realize the true potential of confidential computing.