R3 Brings Ground-breaking Privacy Technology to the Cloud with the General Availability of Conclave Cloud

  • Cloud
  • 07.10.2022 06:00 am

Global enterprise technology and services firm R3 today announced the general availability of Conclave Cloud, a serverless confidential computing platform designed to address the privacy risks that prevent many businesses from deploying cloud-based solutions.

With Conclave Cloud, businesses no longer need to manage infrastructure to develop privacy-preserving applications and services. Instead, they can take advantage of serverless cloud technology – scaling when they need it with a pay-as-you-go pricing model and no upfront infrastructure provisioning.

Data breaches are a problematic fact of life in an increasingly data-driven world. The consequences are a complex mix of infrastructure threats, application threats, compliance risks and data misuse risks. The average cost of a data incident in financial services rose to $4.35 million in 2022– an increase of 2.6% from 2021. As a result, two-thirds of executives increased their organizations’ budgets in 2022 and plan to spend more on cybersecurity in 2023.

The problem with data breaches is rooted in the fact that conventional encryption techniques today protect data when it is at rest and in transit, but not while it is being processed. Conclave Cloud leverages Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) to tackle this problem. By running data in ‘enclaves’ – trusted execution environments – Conclave Cloud ensures that access to data is granted only to authorized parties.

Crucially with Conclave Cloud, a user’s workload can now remain private from everyone. It allows businesses to configure a pre-existing set of services hosted within to solve a variety of different use cases for data sharing and analytics solutions.

Conclave Cloud builds on the benefits of Conclave, which solves critical business challenges where data needs to be shared, but without any one person or firm seeing another’s information. For example, banks that want to collaborate across teams without revealing sensitive data to another business department; or an insurer that needs to share information about fraudulent claims without breaching confidentiality rules.

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. The functions run in the context of a Conclave enclave, meaning end users can verify exactly what code will be running and know that their data is fully encrypted for the lifetime of the function call.

Ivar Wiersma, Head of Conclave at R3, comments: “For the first time, Conclave Cloud allows any organization to access the benefits of confidential computing with serverless infrastructure. 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.”

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