Securely leveraging data

Large organisations in particular face the dilemma of either sharing data and thereby compromising on data protection and control, or keeping their data isolated and thus missing the opportunity to increase their market opportunities.

To meet these challenges, the big players in this business are currently working on a new approach to confidential computing. In 2019, the Confidential Computing Consortium was founded under the leadership of the Linux Foundation.

The organisation aims to better protect data from unauthorised access during use. Users should also benefit from more control and transparency. Alibaba, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom, Tencent, VMware and chip manufacturers ARM and Intel are members of the consortium.

In addition to all the major providers, Zurich-based start-up Decentriq is also a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium. The young company, which was founded by Stefan Deml and Maximilian Groth in 2018, solves the dilemma faced by large organisations by providing data clean rooms for secure and straightforward data collaboration.

Decentriq offers a software-as-a-service platform for data exchange and protection. The platform creates data clean rooms for companies that need to share sensitive data. In these protected environments, several parties can work on and analyse sensitive personal data. None of the parties involved has direct access to the data, as it is encrypted. This ensures that data protection is fully maintained.

Leading Swiss global reinsurance provider Swiss Re, for example, is working with Decentriq’s confidential computing-based platform to help secure data privacy while performing analytics on sensitive datasets. In a proof of concept in marine insurance, Swiss Re used a shipping dataset from a supply chain data aggregator to process data where, typically, data privacy and competitive concerns have presented barriers to access. In Swiss Re’s evaluation, it found improvements in performance, time to market and security using Decentriq’s confidential computing-based platform.