The Defense Ministry has entered into the public cloud for the first time with Confidential Cloud company Anjuna Security, the company announced on Wednesday.
The Palo Alto-based company offers the strongest data security available and their cloud software allows the ministry to leverage Confidential Computing features available in cloud servers that eliminate exposure of data to insiders, malicious software and bad actors.
The Defense Ministry, including the IDF, assigned a red team to conduct a thorough evaluation of the Anjuna Confidential Cloud software, using compute-intensive AI workloads as the initial application.
Some of the tests included the ability to secure against rogue or accidental insiders, third parties, criminal hackers and nation-states. It was also important that the solution be commercially available now and be capable of running across multiple cloud platforms in addition to simplifying migrating applications.
"Israel's Defense Ministry is among the most advanced and stringent security organizations in the world, so it is a tremendous advantage for them to now be able to turn public clouds into fully trusted environments capable of securely processing sensitive data," said Anjuna CEO and co-founder Ayal Yogev.
"With Anjuna, it is both feasible and practical to make the public cloud at least as secure as private infrastructure. We are proud to add the IMOD [Israeli Ministry of Defense] as a customer."
Anjuna's software is attractive to the Defense Mministry because it provides a single, uniform encryption platform able to protect all three states of data: storage, transit and execution. The software also allows sensitive data and applications to remain fully encrypted without the need for any software modifications.
Many government organizations and companies have hesitated to enter the public cloud due to security and control issues, especially considering the highly sensitive data in these organizations.
However,But the Confidential Computing technology in cloud infrastructure and software from Anjuna, makes the public cloud now secure enough for organizations and has the strictest level of security and regulation.
Public cloud vendors, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud also use the hardware-based capability.
Confidential Computing allows companies to secure highly sensitive data, such as state secrets, AI code, intelligence and security details, personally identifiable information, financial information and intellectual property.
Anjuna's Confidential Cloud software "will allow us to quickly move important workloads across public clouds without compromising the high level of security necessary to achieve our mission," according to the Defense Ministry's Infrastructure Cloud Group leader.