Enterprise blockchain firm R3 has today launched its new serverless confidential computing platform Conclave Cloud, to help address privacy risks
Built on the core Conclave platform — which helps solve critical business challenges where data needs to be shared, without any one user or firm seeing another’s information — the cloud service ensures that access to data is only granted to authorised parties.
Developers are able to build and deploy confidential applications in the cloud using the platform, bringing businesses flexibility, speed and cost-reduction.
Users can run data in trusted execution environments called ‘enclaves’, helping to protect data while it is still being processed — a capability often missing within more conventional encryption techniques.
Conclave Cloud leverages Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to tackle this pitfall.
With workloads being protected from unauthorised access, businesses can configure pre-existing sets of services hosted within to solve an array of use cases for data sharing and analytics solutions.
Additionally, serverless technology allows users to scale when needed, with a pay-as-you-go pricing model and no upfront infrastructure provisioning.
The first component of Conclave Cloud to be released is Conclave Functions, which enables stateless functions to be hosted, executed, and scaled on demand while ensuring that data is always encrypted, even during processing.
>See also: How Confidential Computing is dispelling the climate of distrust around cloud security
“For the first time, Conclave Cloud allows any organisation to access the benefits of confidential computing with serverless infrastructure,” said Ivar Wiersma, head of Conclave at R3.
“Critically, this helps improve velocity and decreases the time to production. Because we handle servers, deployment, and ensuring confidentiality, businesses can focus on improving the quality of their application logic.
“The launch of Conclave Cloud is another exciting milestone in our mission to drive widespread adoption of cutting-edge confidential computing technology across complex and highly regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, and the public sector.”
According to IBM research, the average cost of a data incident in financial services (a sector that needs to prioritise privacy due to sensitivity of customer data) rose to $4.35m in 2022 — an increase of 2.6 per cent from 2021.
As a result, two-thirds of executives increased their organisations’ budget in 2022, and plan to spend more on cyber security in 2023, according to PwC.
More information on the newly released Conclave Cloud platform can be found here.
Related:
Confidential computing: the future of security for insurance — Victor Boardman, head of insurance at R3, discusses the issue of trust in an untrusted environment and the role that data-sharing could play in addressing ‘double-dipping’ insurance claims.
Data encryption: what can enterprises learn from consumer tech? — Siamak Nazari, CEO of Nebulon, discusses the data encryption lessons that enterprises can learn from consumer tech.
