Intel and Google Cloud team up to launch super-secure VMs

3 October 2024, 16:39 published

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Google Cloud has announced the general availability of its latest Confidential Computing instances in partnership with Intel.

The new C3 instances use 4th Gen Intel Xeon processors (affectionately known as Sapphire Rapids) and offer a virtual machine solution for businesses handling sensitive or regulated data.

The companies say that Google’s Confidential Computing, which encrypts data during processing, is gaining popularity among regulated industries like financial services, healthcare and government agencies, where data privacy is paramount.

Google Cloud launches its new Confidential Computing VMs

Speaking about the series of new features launched alongside the Intel integration, Product Manager Joanna Young and Product Lead Sam Lugani wrote:

“At Google, we have been early adopters and investors in Confidential Computing products and solutions. For more than four years, we’ve grown our Confidential Computing offerings and added new capabilities, and our customers have deployed these capabilities to enhance the security and confidentiality of their workloads in many innovative ways.”

The press release envisions C3 instances working across cookieless AdTech, multi-bank fraud detection and collaborative medical research.

Moreover, the Intel partnership extends to the use of Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for hardware-based privacy and security. By creating isolated execution environments within virtual machines, TDX promises to keep software and data protected from other cloud tenants and even Google Cloud admins.

The company’s Xeon Scalable processors also enforce encryption at the hardware level.

In-keeping with the security credentials, remote attestation offers cryptographic proof that a VM is genuine and running authenticated firmware, helping companies to maintain compliance with security policies.

Intel Trust Authority also features as a tool that allows companies to manage Confidential Computing environments across multiple clouds, on-prem and edge locations.

Confidential VM with Intel TDX on the C3 machine series is now available me in the asia-southeast1, us-central1 and europe-west4 regions. Google Cloud also noted that Confidential VM incurs additional costs on a per-vCPU and per-GB basis on top of Compute Engine pricing.