at a time when almost every personal detail and confidential information is stored on cloud or smartphones there seems to be an urgent need for ensuring more security for users to do so tech bigwigs like microsoft intel and google are coming together according to a report by engadget tech companies from all over the world are coming to together to form confidential computing consortium microsoft azure cto mark russinovich explained in a blog why the company is joining the consortium microsoft has invested in confidential computing for many years so im excited to announce that microsoft will join industry partners to create the confidential computing consortium a new organization that will be hosted at the linux foundation the confidential computing consortium will be dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing he said in the blog elaborating further on the new alliance microsoft said that confidential computing technologies offer the opportunity for organizations to collaborate on their data sets without giving access to that data to gain shared insights and to innovate for the common good the consortium will include other founding members alibaba arm baidu google cloud ibm intel red hat swisscom and tencent the idea behind the association is for the the tech industry to come together to collaborate on open source technology and frameworks to support these new confidential computing scenariosthe linux foundation which will be hosting the consortium also explained the rationale behind the alliance the confidential computing consortium will bring together hardware vendors cloud providers developers open source experts and academics to accelerate the confidential computing market influence technical and regulatory standards and build open source tools that provide the right environment for tee development it further said that the organization will also anchor industry outreach and education initiativesto help users make the best choice for how to protect their workloads they need to be met with a common language and understanding around confidential computing as the open source community introduces new projects like asylo and openenclave sdk and hardware vendors introduce new cpu features that change how we think about protecting programs operating systems and virtual machines groups like the confidential computing consortium will help companies and users understand its benefits and apply these new security capabilities to their needs said royal hansen vice president security google