SaaS Providers: Never Fear Customer Data Breaches Again

As a SaaS provider, it’s your mission to help your customers gain the economic benefits and scale of the cloud. In a blisteringly competitive landscape, you strive to anticipate their needs and retain their loyalty. But both you and your customers share a common risk: data breach. What hurts them hurts you.   

Priority One: Keeping Your Customer Safe

If your customer could ask just one thing from you, it would be this: Keep our data safe, secure, and confidential. Give us peace of mind knowing we can trust our SaaS unequivocally when moving vital workloads in the cloud. But until now, that’s seemingly been too high a bar, with threat actors holding all the cards. Customers were at risk with every transaction. And you, as their SaaS provider, shared that pressure.  

With so many potential pitfalls and an explosion of vulnerabilities, what’s the best way to offer your customers airtight security? So they know they can entrust you with their most confidential and sensitive data? Plus, how can you address your own unique risks and get a good night’s sleep? 

The Stubborn Riddle of Securing Data in the Cloud 

What vulnerabilities lie behind the large-scale breaches that leave you and your customers open to catastrophic data theft? Data must be secured in three dimensions: at rest, in transit across the network, and while in use. But however sophisticated the security software became, data seemingly could not be simultaneously used and secured. Efforts to hide data using software encryption failed. Encryption keys must be decrypted and exposed in memory before they can be used, which allows hackers or insiders to neutralize and get around these safeguards. 

The Danger From Without—and Within 

The idea of trusted insiders being your Achilles Heel may not be a pleasant one for a SaaS to contemplate. Still, the truth is that your own vetted employees pose a threat to your customers—unintentionally or intentionally. Those who work from home ratchet up the risk even further. You have only limited control over employees and the third-party contractors of your IT cloud platform providers. 

Insiders are a risk because they need host access to do their jobs; they are simply overexposed to host data. One bad actor can lay you open to hackers and compromise the entire organization. Once a malicious insider gains credentials to access a system, the deed is done. We read about breaches caused or started by insiders, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google. The most recent breaches prove that the problem is persistent and growing despite investment in the world’s best security talent. 

Confidential Computing: Hardware-grade, Ironclad Security Made Simple

The time was ripe for a breakthrough. The practical solution to the secure data use paradox is to create trusted execution and storage environments rooted in trusted hardware: Confidential Computing. This advance enables the creation of secure private environments that are actually built on the public cloud infrastructure of AWS, Microsoft Azure, Intel AMD, and others. So your SaaS customers can be confident that their sensitive workloads are protected on any cloud, anywhere. Of course, all major cloud providers already claim to offer hardware-grade security. But you need more than their assurances.  

As a SaaS organization, the ability to offer proven Confidential Computing security is a significant marketplace differentiator. By including the most advanced, hardened security layer of Confidential Computing as an integral part of your service or application, you assure customers that they can rely on you to lock out unauthorized access to their data. 

Ease of Use Makes All the Difference 

Anjuna’s landmark software enables and supports Confidential Computing technologies—without demanding costly investments to refactor and recode every application needing protection. In minutes Anjuna creates private, hardened environments on public cloud infrastructures. It’s so advanced; it’s simple. Essentially, with Anjuna software, customers turn their public cloud into a private cloud (Confidential Cloud) via a secure enclave, also known as a "trusted execution environment" or TEE. Applications run in an environment isolated from the host. Memory is totally isolated from anything else on the machine, including the operating system. Decryption occurs within a secure enclave inside the CPU—itself authenticated through an attestation process to assure the application and code are both genuine and secured.

Now enterprises gain total data protection and control of their data, even in the public cloud. Secure data can't be seen or used outside the TEE. And because infrastructure insiders can't see data, the security processes protecting them can be virtually eliminated, which boosts the productivity of cybersecurity teams and reduces liability risks.

Warts, hackers, and all, the cloud is here to stay. Its unparalleled ability to scale, as well as the economic opportunities it offers, cannot begin to be matched by any other concept. At last, the emergence of Confidential Computing will address hesitancy and help realize the true growth potential of organizations like yours and your customers.