Intel, IBM, Google, Microsoft & others join new security-focused industry group

Some of the biggest names in the cloud and hardware ecosystem have agreed to join a new industry group focused on promoting safe computing practices. Founding members include Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom, and Tencent. Named the Confidential Computing Consortium, this industry group's goals will be to come up with strategies and tools to accelerate the adoption of "confidential computing." By confidential computing, the group is referring to hardware and software-based technical solutions for isolating user data inside a computer's memory while it's being processed, to avoid exposing it to other applications, the operating system, or other cloud server tenants. The easiest way of supporting confidential computing practices is through the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), also known as enclaves. These are hardware and/or software-enforced private regions of a computer's CPU memory where only certain apps can write and read data.