Azure Taps Intel Xeon Platform to Unlock Crypto-enhanced Confidential Computing Scenarios

Intel and Microsoft have strengthened their collaboration to unlock confidential computing scenarios for IT and Cloud customers. As part of the agreement, Intel will provide its crypto-based processors built on the Intel® Xeon® Platform. Azure will now become one of the first commercial adopters of Intel’s third-generation full memory encryption and accelerated cryptographic performance scalable processor, code-named “Ice Lake”.

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Microsoft Azure is expected to leverage Ice Lake capabilities for the confidential computing scenarios with Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX).

Modern IT virtualization and Cloud modernization trends have put immense pressure on data centers and warehouse applications, taxing IT performance in a highly disrupted PaaS and IaaS economies. With Intel® Xeon Scalable Processors, the improved Intel AES-NI design and introduction of Intel® AVX-512 brings a new level of cryptographic performance to the data center.

Intel Xeon Scalable Platform Built for Most Sensitive Workloads

Azure customers would benefit from Intel’s quantum computing and processor technologies which have found wide acceptance in the confidential computing scenarios. Azure itself expanded to computing workloads associated with confidential virtual machines, confidential containers, confidential machine learning, confidential IoT edge devices, and soon confidential capabilities within Azure SQL.

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At the time of this announcement, Michael Shaulov, CEO and co-founder, Fireblocks said –

“At Fireblocks, our mission is to secure blockchain-based assets and transactions for the financial industry. Once we realized the traditional tech stack was not suitable for this challenge, we turned to Azure confidential computing and Intel SGX to implement our patent-pending technology. Our customers trust Fireblocks to securely store and move their digital assets—over $6.5 billion of them each month—and Azure provides a backbone for us to deliver on that promise.”

Fireblocks is an Azure customer.

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