Israel’s MOD chooses confidential computing to secure its public cloud data

Today, confidential computing provider Anjuna Security Inc. announced that Israel’s Ministry of Defense (IMOD) had deployed its solution to enter the public cloud for the first time. IMOD will use the provider’s solution to encrypt sensitive data and applications to reduce the exposure of data to both insiders and external threat actors. 

IMOD’s move to the public cloud and use of Anjuna Security to secure data at runtime highlights the claim that confidential computing technologies are not only suitable for securing protected information but also regulated enterprise data. 

Making the public cloud safe 

The announcement comes as many government institutions and organizations in regulated industries have traditionally been reluctant to embrace the public cloud, with the majority of security professionals believing that cloud providers’ efforts to ensure security for users is “just barely” adequate,. In fact, 80% of companies report experiencing a cloud data breach in 2020. 

For enterprises and decision makers, IMOD’s partnership with Anjuna Security suggests that confidential computing could provide the answer to securing public cloud deployments and protecting mission-critical data. 

“Israel MOD is one of the most secure organizations on the planet and they have one of the best red teams on the planet to validate their security. The fact that they are using Anjuna Confidential Cloud software to move their sensitive workloads to the public cloud means that any organization can do the same, regardless of the level of their privacy or security concerns,” said Ayal Yogev, cofounder and CEO of Anjuna. 

As IMOD’s cloud infrastructure group leader explained, with confidential computing “we don’t have to worry about malicious or compromised insiders, including employees of the public cloud, even if they have full access to the infrastructure. Because of the sensitivity of our data, this was a major concern, and Anjuna enabled us to leverage the public clouds for things we didn’t think were possible to move to that environment.” 

The confidential computing boom

Anjuna Security is part of the confidential computing market, which Everest Group anticipates could grow to $54 billion by 2026, in response to enterprise cloud and security initiatives and an increase in privacy regulations. 

It’s competing not only against confidential computing providers like Google Cloud, which launched a confidential computing service in 2020 to enable data to remain encrypted during processing, but also against homomorphic encryption solutions like Fortanix, a multicolour data security platform with cryptographic services, which raised $23 million in Series B funding in 2019, bringing the company’s total funding to $31 million. 

However, Anjuna is the only confidential computing solution on the market that enables customers to protect any application in any cloud ecosystem, and goes well beyond the protection offered by homomorphic encryption technologies, which didn’t meet the IMOD’s requirements. 

“Confidential computing is the right technology to serve as one of the main security controls and protect our cloud environment. Other technologies we tested, like homomorphic encryption, just weren’t mature enough. As for Anjuna, they are the only company that can protect any application in any cloud environment, so the choice was clear,” said IMOD’s cloud infrastructure group leader.