Data Security and Privacy Protection in Public Clouds

We are entering a whole new data security and privacy paradigm. Major cloud vendors are so powerful that—whether by choice or simple inability—the responsibility for safeguarding customers from exploding novel cybercrime is on the customers. So in many ways, organizations are on their own “in the wild” and must scramble to protect valuable data across its entire lifecycle—at rest, in motion, and in use.

In its 2022 Global Risks Report, the World Economic Forum evaluated threats most likely to aggravate societal fractures. The report named digital attacks and vulnerabilities as a grave concern and Protecting Digital Developments as a top priority, essential to the stability of civilization itself.

This is a tall order for any business, and compliance is also a large aspect of this risk. If data becomes compromised, an organization’s brand and financial stability come under tremendous pressure. Maintaining security without impacting IT productivity is one of today’s most complex challenges.

How Vast is the Data Security and Privacy Risk?

Digital commerce will grow by $800 billion when we reach 2024. And as the cyberthreat landscape becomes more complex, it sprouts an increasing number of critical failure points. The numbers tell the story: In banking alone, ransomware increased by 1318% in 2021; According to an IBM study, 95% of cybersecurity issues are traced to human error.

Only recently we saw how digitalized physical supply chains depend on technology providers and other third parties when weaknesses created shocking shortages worldwide. In December 2021, the Log4j vulnerability spawned more than 100 attempts to exploit it every minute, proving that free-access coding can become a vector for cybercrime.
Compounding the security threats posed by cloud ubiquity and scale are the data security and privacy risks accompanying trusted insiders and third parties. In fact, one of the biggest threats to enterprise IT security is within your very organization. Cloud-based computing only exacerbates the problem because you have limited control over the employees and third-party contractors of your IT cloud platform providers.

Insiders are fundamentally dangerous because they are given host access in order to carry out their jobs; they are overexposed to host data. Although most insiders are honest and merely earning their living—it takes only one bad actor to compromise the entire organization.

Efforts to hide data using software encryption have failed. Computing hardware requires encryption keys to be decrypted and exposed in memory before they can be used, allowing hackers or insiders to neutralize and get around these safeguards.

Enter Confidential Computing.

Confidential Computing for Data Security and Privacy

Confidential Computing is an architectural approach founded on isolating data and execution within a secure space on a system, using virtualization to create a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) or secure enclave. This architecture reflects the fact that enterprise IT threats emanate from within and outside your organization—and from the cloud itself. Secure enclaves form the foundation for Confidential Computing, a feature now provided by all cloud providers.

Working on top of this technology, Anjuna allows organizations to securely process unmodified workloads anywhere — through the fortification and isolation of data in use. Anjuna’s Confidential Computing software alleviates the data security hurdles of migrating applications to the cloud by eliminating data vulnerabilities and consolidating IT resources. This opens the door for businesses to deploy a new, secure, hosted IT infrastructure based on Confidential Computing. Applications and whole environments can be protected without rearchitecting and with no performance impact.

Lock Out Cloud Admins and Insiders from Access

Anjuna shuts off cloud insider data exposure. The data attack surface at the cloud provider level no longer offers access to a potential threat actor. And these controls extend across the entire landscape of data exposure, whether storage, over the network, or in multiple clouds.

Thus, you gain exclusive data control and hardware-grade minimization of data risk. The breakthrough makes data protection inseparable from the data itself. You no longer need the traditional (and vulnerable) layers of perimeter security. As the data owner, you are in exclusive control of your data anywhere it is stored, transmitted, or used. The data encryption and resource isolation extend across all of the fundamental elements of IT—compute, storage, and communications.

Now you can run your workloads in a trusted environment knowing that you are safely isolated from CloudOps insiders, malicious software, or would-be attackers. Even when a server is physically compromised, your workloads remain secure. All of this can be done with no modification of your underlying application.

Complete Data Security and Privacy In the Cloud

Anjuna Confidential Computing software secures your existing workloads by enabling software to operate transparently within an isolated private environment over the public-hosted cloud infrastructure—no changes or re-writing of applications required. And no alterations to IT operations. Anjuna automates an isolated, inaccessible, ironclad, hardware-encrypted confidential environment within seconds. Even privileged users on the operating systems can’t access your data or applications

Formerly, to get an application running in a secure enclave, developers had to rewrite it using open-source SDKs—a time-consuming and tedious process that could take thousands of development hours. Now Anjuna enables this in minutes, out-of-the-box. Anjuna supports Intel, AMD, and AWS Nitro Enclaves platforms and native Kubernetes Key management solutions on public clouds. 

Secure Any Application with Confidential Computing

Anjuna Confidential Computing software enables applications to be securely deployed in any environment—public, private and hybrid—as well as containers, virtual machines, and bare-metal servers. Enterprises are never locked into a given technology. You can execute anywhere—on-premises or in the cloud—and maintain secure control. 

At last, organizations can protect high-value applications, even secrets management, service mesh, web services, databases, and machine learning applications. And you can also feel secure in high-risk locations—like geographies where privacy concerns impact the monitoring of employees. Say goodbye to legacy perimeter security without disrupting operations, applications, or IT. Anjuna makes the public cloud secure for business and isolates existing data and workloads from insiders, bad actors, and malicious code. 

Enterprises choose Anjuna to address data privacy and compliance concerns (GDPR, SHIELD, CCPA) or to meet digital transformation goals like migrating workloads to the cloud or secure data sharing with multi-party computation (MPC). With Anjuna, you’ll get transparency, integrity, and security in all stages of processing and collecting personal data to ensure data privacy while enabling the growth of your business.