"Hardware-Assisted Encryption of Data in Use Gets Confidential"

Data protection is a top priority for organizations responsible for safeguarding their own data and the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) stored and processed on behalf of their business partners and customers. If it is not done correctly, the organization risks losing trust and violating increasingly stringent data protection regulation. Therefore, the question remains as to what can be done to fortify defenses. The Register surveyed its readership on the subject of Confidential Computing to find out. Those who participated indicated that their company deals with customers from various industry verticals, with financial services accounting for 21.5 percent of the poll. Equally as many respondents work with government agencies as they do with customers in the healthcare sector (15.3 percent), followed by education (12.4 percent), and retail (10.7 percent). A little over 10 percent of the respondents work with clients in defense and national security, with 8.5 percent from the manufacturing sector and 6.2 percent from the energy sector. All of these industries will almost certainly collect, store, and process sensitive information from their customers and business partners. After determining the types of organizations that responded, they were asked about the technologies their organization would consider in beefing up security for sensitive data stored in data centers. This was a question that allowed for multiple responses, reflecting the inevitability that cybersecurity is not an either/or proposition, and could include the use of multiple different tools at the same time to protect the information that customers entrust to a company for secure hosting and processing. Encryption of data and applications is the most widely used technology in this regard, with nearly 80 percent of the survey population using it. Given the long history of encryption and the widespread use of Virtual Private Network (VPN), disk encryption, encrypted email, and other device-level tools with embedded symmetric and asymmetric Data Encryption Standard (DES), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) technologies, this is to be expected. This article continues to discuss key findings from the survey on the subject of Confidential Computing. 

The Register reports "Hardware-Assisted Encryption of Data in Use Gets Confidential"