Microsoft, Google and Intel Combine to Form Data Protection Consortium

In a recent blog post, Mark Russinovich, CTO, Microsoft Azure has mentioned that Confidential Computing Consortium will define and accelerate the adoption of confidential computing. Microsoft joins Google, Intel and other founding members like ARM, IBM, Red Hat, Tencent, Swisscom, Baidu, Alibaba to form the Data Protection Consortium. Linux Foundation will host this new organization.

The following companies will collaborate and work together to form an open-source technology and frameworks. This technology will help the organizations to work on their data sets without giving any access to their data. It will help in gaining shared insights and innovating new technologies together.

There are three types of data exposure that needs to be protected. One of them is the data when it is in rest. The second of them is when the data is in transit position. The third and most critical one is when the data is in use. This type of data is also called confidential computing.

The protection of data in use means that during the computation, the data is invisible in unencrypted form to the authorized code to access it. It also means that it is inaccessible to the public cloud service providers or edge device vendors. Confidential Computing Consortium will provide the solution to make the data private from the edge to the public cloud all the way.

To develop such technology to deal with the protection of data is in use, all the organizations will work together. Like, Microsoft provides its framework to write the code which will be run inside the trusted execution platforms. Intel will protect the code at the hardware level. On the other hand, Red Hat will abstract the secure environments to create as well as run private applications without the server. So, each one of the collaborating companies will contribute somehow in protecting the confidential computing data.

Confidential Computing Consortium is a public commitment given by Microsoft to protect the data, but there is a need to do a lot of work on Confidential Computing Consortium, i.e. CCC. It is a difficult and essential task to secure the data as it plays a major role in the safety of an organization. People are waiting for such innovation and development of technology that can help millions of individuals as well as companies in protecting their data.