Cohesity, a company specializing in AI-powered data security and management, is collaborating with Intel to enhance the security of its FortKnox cloud service. This partnership aims to integrate Intel’s confidential computing technology into Cohesity’s platform, providing advanced protection for data while it is actively processed.
This collaboration marks a significant step forward, helping the service provider address some of the most pressing cybersecurity challenges faced in the cloud computing space today. This gives managed IT service providers like this one another solution they can pitch to clients who need to comply with strict data security requirements.
What is Confidential Computing?
Confidential computing is a cloud computing solution designed to protect data during processing. Traditionally, data has been secured while at rest (in storage) and in transit (moving over a network). However, data in use, or data being actively processed in memory, is often vulnerable, creating a weak spot in the security chain.
Confidential computing addresses this gap by isolating sensitive data within a protected CPU enclave during processing. This secure enclave, also known as a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), ensures that the data being processed is accessible only to authorized code. It is invisible and inaccessible to anything or anyone else, including the operating system, hypervisor, and even the cloud service provider.
This is achieved by using embedded encryption keys and attestation mechanisms to maintain security. If unauthorized code attempts to access the data, the TEE denies access and cancels the computation.
The primary goal of confidential computing is to provide greater assurance to organizations that their data in the cloud is protected and confidential, making it less risky to move more sensitive data and computing workloads to public cloud services. This technology is particularly crucial for industries handling highly regulated or sensitive data, such as financial institutions, healthcare providers, and government agencies.
As tech excitement for AI tools reaches a fever pitch, confidential computing is also a way to allow different models to run in public cloud servers with an added layer of safety.
What the Partnership Aims to Achieve
Intel is an industry leader when it comes to confidential computing. In 2019, the company was one of the founding members of the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) under the Linux Foundation. Today, Intel offers a comprehensive suite of technologies that enhance data security across various environments, with many of those technologies being relevant to the cloud computing space.
The partnership between Cohesity and Intel is centered around integrating Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) into Cohesity’s FortKnox cyber vault service. This integration aims to provide enhanced security for data in use, significantly reducing the risk of data breaches and insider attacks.
Some of the benefits of the partnership include:
– Enhanced Data Security: By incorporating Intel SGX, Cohesity will enable data to be encrypted in memory, ensuring that sensitive information remains protected even during processing.
– Verification and Trust: Cohesity customers will also benefit from the Intel Trust Authority, which allows them to verify the integrity of their SGX enclaves. This verification process ensures that only authorized and untampered code can access the encrypted data.
– Performance and Integration: Cohesity’s platform handles the confidential computing process to ensure that there is no impact on performance.
What to Expect Moving Forward
This recent partnership between Cohesity and Intel is part of a broader trend where cloud service providers are increasingly investing in confidential computing technologies. As cyber threats become more sophisticated and the need to protect sensitive data grows, the demand for secure cloud computation systems is only going to increase.
Another factor pushing the adoption of these technologies is trust. As more companies adopt confidential computing standards and utilize them effectively, the confidence of stakeholders in these technologies can be expected to grow, encouraging more businesses and government agencies to trust these servers with their sensitive information.
