Hybrid cloud has become the dominant approach for enterprise cloud strategies, but it comes with complexity and concerns over integration, security and skills. To address these concerns, the industry is increasingly adopting container runtime environments to abstract away infrastructure. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RH OCP) has emerged as a leading solution for supporting the application development lifecycle, provisioning and managing container images and workloads into a platform for containerized applications and ecosystem. RH OCP provides a common deployment, control and management environment for workloads across a diverse set of infrastructures that underpin a hybrid cloud.

In brief, Red Hat OpenShift is the leading hybrid cloud application platform built on open-source innovation designed to build, deploy and run applications at massive scale, wherever you want.

Hybrid cloud is also forcing a significant rethinking of how to secure and protect data and assets. As such, the industry continues to move away from traditional moat-and-castle strategies towards zero trust-based architectures that micro-segment environments to minimize attack surfaces.

Confidential containers with IBM Secure Execution for Linux offer technical assurance by protecting the data-in-use. This means that a provider or person cannot access the data, providing a higher level of security. This capability enables the protection of sensitive and regulated workloads in a hybrid cloud environment.

IBM and RedHat have collaborated to make confidential container technology available, marrying security-rich enclave technology such as IBM Secure Execution for Linux with Kubernetes-based OpenShift. This allows for the deployment of containers into secured pods, providing an operational experience while also designed to protect a tenant’s containers from privileged user access.

IBM is further adding additional zero trust principles designed to increase security and ease of use with the IBM Hyper Protect Platform.

Confidential containers play a key role across various industries, such as healthcare, financial services, and digital rights management, among others, by securing data and fostering innovation.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is confidential container technology?

Confidential container technology offers technical assurance by protecting the data-in-use. This means that a provider or person cannot access the data, providing a higher level of security for sensitive and regulated workloads.

How does Red Hat OpenShift contribute to confidential computing?

Red Hat OpenShift leverages confidential container capabilities to create a security-rich enclave for various industries, protecting sensitive data and applications from unauthorized access and potential breaches.

What are some use cases for confidential containers?

Confidential containers have various use cases, including securing AI models and training data, protecting sensitive patient data in healthcare, enhancing digital rights management and intellectual property protection, enabling secure financial transactions, and ensuring data privacy and sovereignty in a sovereign cloud environment.

For more information about Confidential Compute with IBM Secure Execution on IBM LinuxONE, click here.