Fortanix Announces Industry-First 100th Production Customer for Confidential Computing

Expanding technology ecosystem and real-world use cases anchor company’s leadership in new category poised for rapid growth

Fortanix® Inc., the data-first multicloud security™ company, today announced that it had crossed a significant landmark by booking its 100^th Confidential Computing production customer. Fortanix also announced an expansion of its technology ecosystem to support AWS Nitro Enclaves, Cisco, and AMD-based confidential computing solutions, as well as an expanded set of practical, real-world use cases. Together, these announcements reinforce Fortanix's leadership in a market that is projected to grow to $54 billion by 2026¹.

Particle, the leading integrated edge-to-cloud IoT platform company is the 100^th Fortanix Confidential Computing customer. “Particle’s relationship with Fortanix allows us to offer a variety of new security and trust-centric features in our products and services. It’s another important investment towards our goal of becoming the most trusted IoT platform in the world,” says Mike Sheward, Head of Security at Particle. “We often say that building a product on the Particle platform is like having the mechanics who designed and built the car come along for every journey. With Fortanix Confidential Computing in the mix, not only do you have the mechanics onboard, but you’ve also got industry-leading security capabilities along for the ride as well!”

Confidential Computing protects applications and the sensitive data they process from unauthorized access and tampering during processing. Fortanix counts amongst its customers some of the largest and best-known brands around the world, including financial services, healthcare, government, fintech, energy, and professional services customers.

“Fortanix was founded on the vision of what Confidential Computing can offer, and it gives us great pride to cross this milestone,” said Ambuj Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of Fortanix. “More importantly, we are excited to unlock the benefits of this transformational technology in the real world, at a time when data security and privacy have never been more important and impacting people and organizations around the world.”

In a recently published report², Gartner® said that “by year-end 2023, 75% of the world’s population will have its personal data covered under modern privacy regulations.”

Fortanix’s Confidential Computing success is anchored in its simplicity of implementation, ease of use, and ready-to-run applications. Cloud-native technologies and comprehensive APIs enable easy integration of advanced data security and confidential data processing into almost any application environment. As a result, data remains private and secure throughout its lifecycle – at rest, in transit, and even in use.

CONTINUED INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP WITH INTEL, MICROSOFT, AND CISCO

Fortanix Confidential Computing was first developed on Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) to partition applications into processor-hardened enclaves, which continues to provide the highest levels of security for the most secure applications. "Fortanix was early in recognizing the game-changing potential of Confidential Computing enabled by Intel SGX. One hundred customers in production with Intel SGX-based solutions is a huge milestone that demonstrates the market-leading and proven nature of this technology,” said Anil Rao, VP and GM of Systems Architecture and Engineering, Office of CTO, at Intel. “Fortanix is a critical partner leading the way in enabling enterprises to improve their data privacy and integrity posture."

Fortanix also continues a long-standing partnership with Microsoft in the development and deployment of Confidential Computing in Microsoft Azure. Working together, Fortanix, Microsoft, and Intel have delivered some of the world’s flagship Confidential Computing implementations for healthcare, finance, and government applications.

Extending these efforts, Fortanix is working with Cisco UCS Confidential Computing technologies. “We are excited to partner with Fortanix to extend the hybrid cloud vision we have with UCS, HyperFlex, and Intersight with this secure computing architecture,” said Dan Hanson, CTO, Cloud and Compute Technology Office, Cisco Systems Inc. “We believe that a simpler and easier way to consume secure enclaves will address emerging risks. Customers who choose to deploy Fortanix alongside Cisco Intersight, Intersight Kubernetes Service, and both X and C series servers will gain enhanced benefits via our partnership.”

NEW SUPPORT FOR AWS AND AMD

Enterprises operate in a multi-platform, multi-cloud world. In recognition of this, Fortanix continues to expand support to increase the choices available to customers. Fortanix today announced new support for AWS Nitro Enclaves and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). AWS Nitro Enclaves provides an isolated and hardened environment to protect code and data in-use. Fortanix will provide software applications along with management tools and services for these and other Confidential Computing platforms and technologies.

REAL-WORLD USE CASES

“Trust is essential to build and grow organizations and can even be a significant competitive differentiation, especially in privacy and security sensitive industries,” said Amita Potnis, research director, Future of Trust at IDC. “Technologies such as Fortanix Confidential Computing will be key in helping organizations build trust, avoid breaches of sensitive data, and ensure regulatory compliance globally.”

The growth of the Fortanix customer base has been driven by real-world, practical applications of Confidential Computing technology. In general, these are projects that have been constrained by strict data privacy regulations and compliance requirements.

Fortanix customer BeeKeeperAI, created at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI), uses Intel SGX to accelerate the development and deployment of AI algorithms in healthcare. “BeeKeeperAI was created with the mission to change the future of healthcare with AI, by solving the healthcare data access problem,” said Dr. Michael S. Blum, MD, CEO, Co-founder, BeeKeeperAI. “With Fortanix Confidential Computing technology, we can remove the barriers to accessing critical clinical data which is essential to developing, validating, and deploying high quality, impactful algorithms resulting in optimal health and healthcare.”

Fortanix financial services customer Consilient is an innovator bringing federated machine learning technology powered by Intel SGX to the fight against financial crime. Consilient’s Dozer^TM solution transforms how organizations discover threats like money laundering and fraud by allowing financial institutions to collaborate across institutions, industries, and geographies, without the challenges and risk of moving data. "Financial institutions face immense pressure to earn trust and avoid threats, but the inability to share data hinders the industry from effectively managing the risks from fraud and money laundering," said Gary M. Shiffman, Co-Founder and CEO of Consilient. "With Fortanix Confidential Computing technology, Consilient's federated machine learning solution, Dozer, moves across financial institutions securely, allowing each to leverage industry insights while enhancing data security or data privacy.”

Fortanix customers use Fortanix Confidential Computing for a wide variety of additional use cases. Fintech companies and crypto platforms use Fortanix for blockchain, crypto wallets and NFTs. Global enterprises rely on Fortanix to tackle challenges like data sovereignty, cloud key management, and proliferating compliance regulations. Fortanix also helps address the uniquely challenging demands of secure multi-party data sharing, further supported by the recently announced Fortanix partnership with Snowflake.

Availability

Fortanix Confidential Computing solutions are available today from Fortanix, Fortanix authorized resellers, the Azure Marketplace, and the Google Cloud Marketplace. Fortanix solutions are delivered software as a service (SaaS), in the cloud, and on-premises.

Join Fortanix webinar titled “Confidential Computing in Action: Securing Data and AI”, featuring Fortanix customer TGen, on February 23, 2022 to learn what Fortanix Confidential Computing can do for you. Register Here

Additional Resources

• Learn about Fortanix Confidential Computing use cases
• Read the data sheet on Fortanix's Confidential Computing Manager
• Download the whitepaper "Securing Healthcare AI with Confidential Computing"
• Download eBook “Demystifying Confidential Computing”

About Fortanix:

Fortanix® is the data-first multicloud security company. As the industry’s first and largest provider of confidential computing solutions, Fortanix decouples data security from infrastructure. Fortanix solutions empower organizations with centralized controls to secure data spread across clouds, applications, SaaS, databases, and data centers. Over a hundred enterprises worldwide, especially in privacy-sensitive industries like healthcare, fintech, financial services, government, and retail, trust Fortanix for cloud security and privacy. Fortanix investors include Intel Capital, Foundation Capital, Neotribe Ventures, and In-Q-Tel. Fortanix is headquartered in Mountain View, CA. For more information, visit https://fortanix.com/.

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¹Source: Everest Group, “Confidential Computing – The Next Frontier in Data Security, 2021”

²Source: Gartner, “Top strategic technology trends for 2022: Privacy Enhancing Computation”, Bart Willemsen, Ramon Krikken, Mark Horvath, Oct 18, 2021. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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