Google, Intel, Microsoft Join Data Protection Consortium

Microsoft has joined other industry partners like Google and Intel to create the Confidential Computing Consortium, a new organisation that will be hosted at The Linux Foundation. The consortium will include other founding members Alibaba, ARM, Baidu, IBM, Intel, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent.

In this organisation, the industry can come together to collaborate on open source technology and frameworks to support new confidential computing scenarios.

"The Confidential Computing Consortium will be dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing," Mark Russinovich, CTO, Microsoft Azure, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

Confidential computing technologies offer the opportunity for organisations to collaborate on their data sets without giving access to that data, to gain shared insights and to innovate for the common good.

As computing moves from on-premises to the public cloud and the edge, protecting data becomes more complex.

"There are three types of possible data exposure to protect against. One is data at rest and another data in transit. While there's always room to improve and innovate, the industry has built technologies and standards to address these scenarios.

"The third possible exposure - or as I like to think of it, the critical ‘third leg of the stool' - is data in use. Protecting data while in use is called confidential computing," Russinovich explained.