Google Cloud announces 'breakthrough' confidential computing with encryption at all times

American tech giant Google in its annual Cloud Next conference held this week has formally announced the Confidential Virtual Machines (VMs), a step towards confidential and secure cloud computing. The "breakthrough technology" will allow users to encrypt sensitive data not only as it is stored or sent to the cloud, but while it is being worked on as well", Google said. The technology will allow encryption of cloud computing so the data stored on Cloud will be safe and secure.

"Confidential VMs take this to the next level by offering memory encryption so that you can further isolate your workloads in the cloud," Google said in an online statement announcing the technology.

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'Data encryption in rest, transit and in process'

Google Cloud General Manager Sunil Potti believes the technology will attract companies to store their sensitive data on cloud which they earlier withheld due to security concerns. It is said that the transition to the platform will be seamless without any technical hindrances as the program will not compromise current performance.  

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian during Tuesday's keynote address said that Google Cloud is investing aggressively in ensuring your success as a customer or partner, after witnessing a global demand in the industry.

“There are many different things that we're doing: expanding and specializing our global sales team, introducing new, mission-critical, 15-minute response time support, a well-defined methodology for data centre transformation, and a strong and expanding global partner network,” he said.

“We recognise when you move workloads to Google Cloud that security and privacy are important areas of risk, and a concern for customers. Kurian said adding, "Confidential Computing allows you, as a customer, to run workloads in Google Cloud and to ensure that data is not only encrypted at rest and in transit, but it's even encrypted while it's being processed.”

“This gives you the ability to ensure that all your data is protected all the time when it is being processed with Google,” Kurian asserted.

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AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization feature of its second-generation EPYC processors is being used by Google in its new and secured cloud computing. AMD's technology demands the tasks to proceed with real-time encryption by dedicated VM instance keys generated by and residing solely within the VM. This technique blocks access by Google and other VMs running on the host site, and the encryption keys cannot be exported. 

"If I look at today, an admin has the ability to peer in and see what's going on in each one of those VMs. And if I have a bad actor on one of those VMs there are tools that they can use to break out into neighbours' VMs, peer inside and see the data, because it's all unencrypted. But now, as the admin spins up VMs, they can no longer peer into those VMs and see the data. And if I have a bad actor in those VMs and they break into another one, they can't see the data that's encrypted." AMD's Greg Gibby, a senior product manager, said.