An alternative approach to digital sovereignty: Confidential Computing

Digital sovereignty is a hot topic not only for governments but also for organisations that operate across jurisdictional and national boundaries - and therefore all major financial businesses. Restricting the ability of foreign-owned or foreign-controlled organisations OR GOVERNMENTS to access data owned by, about or important to national citizens or interests and reducing dependence on foreign-owned or -controlled infrastructure is complex, but becoming a firm requirement from regulators and lawmakers. Most approaches attempt to move computing resources - often to less-appropriate or favourable locations - or to rely on contractual agreements. This session introduces an alternative: using Confidential Computing - a set of widely-available, hardware-based technologies - to isolate applications and their data from the underlying infrastructure, operators and owners, implementing a truly isolated zero-trust friendly architecture. We will discuss the basics of the technology and then examine how well it fits the needs of digital sovereignty, explaining its applicability for use cases from finance, AI, Web3 and the broader Enterprise.