Ayal Yogev is the co-founder and CEO of Anjuna, the leading multi-cloud confidential computing platform. Ayal firmly believes that the best security solutions are enablers – they open up new opportunities that wouldn’t exist without a heightened level of security and trust. To achieve this, the industry needs a new way of thinking, building, and delivering applications that keeps enterprises in the driver’s seat and keeps their data protected at all times.
Ayal is passionate about giving companies the freedom to run applications anywhere in the world with complete data security and privacy. That’s why he co-founded Anjuna.
With over two decades of experience in the enterprise security space, Ayal shares his thoughts on how confidential computing will impact the cybersecurity landscape. He explains how confidential computing will be the antidote to today’s patchwork of ineffective security solutions, and how it’s poised to make security an enabler of innovation rather than an inhibitor.
M.R. Rangaswami: Can you explain what confidential computing is and why it’s now seeing increased momentum?
Ayal Yogev: The majority of today’s cybersecurity solutions focus on detecting a breach once it’s already happened, then dealing with the repercussions. However, this approach leaves applications and data extremely vulnerable. Confidential computing addresses this vulnerability by processing data inside a hardware-isolated secure enclave, which ensures that data and code are protected during processing. Even in the event of a breach, applications running in confidential computing environments are invisible to attackers and therefore tamper-proof.
Confidential computing has seen rapidly growing support from cloud service providers and hardware manufacturers such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Arm because of its massive, positive impacts on data security. However, it’s largely flown under the radar because of the engineering feat required to re-architect workloads to take advantage of it. Prior to Anjuna, it would take significant developer effort to re-code an application to work in just one of the clouds and then you’d have to repeat the work for each cloud you wanted to use. This is a daunting idea for many enterprises and a big reason why adoption has been slow. But this is changing.
Similar to VMware with server virtualization, Anjuna provides a new specialized software layer that allows enterprises to take advantage of the new hardware capabilities without the need to recode. Ajuna abstracts the complexity of confidential computing CPUs and democratizes access to this powerful technology that will redefine security and cloud.
M.R.: Which industries and companies are adopting this technology and what are the impacts they’ve seen?
Ayal: According to IDC, less than half of enterprise workloads have moved to the cloud. Regulated verticals like financial services are only 20% of the way into their cloud journeys, meaning that 80% of workloads remain on-premises. Although running applications on-premise is less scalable, more complex and typically more expensive than in the cloud, CIOs are prevented from moving to the cloud by security, because in the cloud data security and privacy becomes a shared responsibility between you and your cloud service provider. Confidential computing finally solves this fundamental issue by isolating code and data from anyone with access to your infrastructure.
The value of confidential computing is broadly applicable and I expect that a few years from now confidential computing will be how all enterprise workloads run. In the short term, we see most security-conscious and heavily regulated organizations as the early adopters. Anjuna, for example, works with companies in financial services, government, blockchain, and other highly sensitive industries.
M.R.: When can we expect to see this technology impact our daily lives? What will this look like?
Ayal: Confidential computing is already present in our everyday lives – we use it to protect our phones, credit cards, and more. This is now moving to the server side, and in the future it will move everything to the edge, creating a world of borderless computing.
Adoption of confidential computing is at an inflection point. The ecosystem of manufacturers and cloud services providers has already moved. Intel, AMD, ARM, Nvidia, AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, and IBM have already shipped, or are about to ship, confidential computing enabled hardware and cloud services. What we’ve been missing is the software stack that democratized access to these new powerful capabilities, making it easy to use it for all apps without modifications.
I expect that over time, confidential computing will become the de-facto standard for how we run applications. The impact on our daily life will be huge. With ensured data security and privacy, organizations will not only be able to move more applications to the cloud, but also safely adopt emerging technologies like blockchain or AI. Moreover, entire new use cases like cross-organization data sharing and analytics will now be possible with incredible benefits in a wide range of industries like healthcare, financial services, media, and advertising.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com