Most cloud-focused organizations host their data in multiple locations at a given time, some of which aren’t built to accommodate the sensitivity of that information.

Confidential computing aims to isolate sensitive workloads and protect them under added security layers within the overarching storage/compute infrastructure.

“At a high level, confidential computing is the ability to take any workload or piece of data, no matter how sensitive, and run it completely isolated, private and protected, essentially on any infrastructure,” said Ayal Yogev (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Anjuna Security Inc. “That enables organizations to take any workload and move it to potentially sensitive locations, like the public cloud, where somebody else is managing your infrastructure.”

Yogev spoke with industry analyst John Furrier at the recent AWS Summit San Francisco event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the increasingly common use cases for confidential computing in a cloud-crazed tech landscape. (* Disclosure below.) 

Who is it for, really?

Two key qualities companies want in their cloud products are security and privacy; and most prominent providers bundle these as built-in features. What Anjuna is doing for cloud security, however, can be likened to what VMware Inc. did for virtualization technology.

“Virtualization was this extremely powerful technology that everybody knew was going to change the world,” Yogev said. “You wouldn’t have the public cloud without virtualization. But the problem was, it was very difficult to use, very, very low level because it was a hardware technology. And then every vendor built a different technology. This is exactly the case now with confidential computing.”

Built on top of AWS Nitro Enclaves, Anjuna makes the process of securing workloads simpler, more observable and uniform across all of the major cloud platforms, according to Yogev.

“We added a software stack to make it super simple to use and ubiquitous across the different clouds,” he said.

From financial companies looking to safeguard credit card and Social Security details to medical institutions storing millions of health records, the general conundrum is securing data even while its being used. With the hardware finally capable enough, the enterprise is now at a point where confidential computing can solve for this problem and allow a complete overhaul on how organizations perceive cloud security and privacy, according to Yogev.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Summit San Francisco event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE