For those who have been following our journey, you already know that Profian’s roots are as fedora-wearing and open-source-loving as they come. Our co-founders, Mike Bursell, CEO, and Nathaniel McCallum, CTO, are former Red Hat associates. Enarx, the open source project designed to enable hardware independence for applications running in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs – the section of the CPU that is isolated from all other users and processors on a given host and the basis of Profian’s Confidential Computing solution) was originally a Red Hat-sponsored project. Today, Profian is the custodian of Enarx.
So it should come as no surprise that our shared history with Red Hat has manifested in a technology collaboration. The Profian team is looking forward to meeting the needs of customers who seek to add a Confidential Computing strategy to their open hybrid cloud deployments using Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.
Avoid lock-in, satisfy regulators and manage risk
In addition to our common roots, Profian and Red Hat share a product strategy that puts our customers’ needs for openness, scalability and portability at the center of what we deliver.
Profian Assure, our flagship Confidential Computing open source solution, can solve a broad spectrum of business challenges – from providing hardware security modules (HSMs), to crypto wallets, deal rooms, secure multi-party collaboration, multi-factor identification, securing PII operations and more.
Our cloud, language and hardware-neutral solution works harmoniously with Red Hat OpenShift to help customers easily control their deployments. When leveraging Red Hat OpenShift, Confidential Computing is portable from one hardware stack to another, one cloud provider to another, and from on-premise to the cloud or vice versa.
The portability of Profian Assure, orchestrated by Red Hat OpenShift, is essentially a hedge against risk should any part of the compute stack fail.
Specific benefits of Profian Confidential Computing with Red Hat OpenShift include:
- Extend cloud benefits of cost savings, faster time to market to industry-regulated workloads. Profian Assure lowers the risk of cloud deployments by encrypting data in use, a known security issue. Our Confidential Computing solution makes it possible to move industry-regulated workloads to the cloud for new and innovative use cases, while Red Hat OpenShift can more seamlessly spin up and orchestrate applications with microservices for a cloud-like experience anywhere it’s deployed.
- Collaborate at scale with confidence. Partners, competitors and government agencies can now share and collectively analyze sensitive data with the power of cloud-scale machine learning without exposing the underlying intellectual property. With Profian Assure, you can safely run multiple projects on a single server knowing each TEE is a mini-fortress separated from the host as well as other applications that may be running. Collaboration at scale solves complex problems and brings new products to market.
- Support remote work with the right level of access for each project. For high-security workloads frequently found in government, healthcare or financial services industries, IT security is often coupled with physical security. In other words, separate (costly) servers may be needed per project, or sometimes security-cleared employees may have to show up for work in a physically-secured building. With Profian Assure, access privileges are set up for each user on a project, and each project is isolated on a server, allowing for both remote access to work and efficient use of shared hardware.
Set it and forget it
How hard is it to add Profian Assure’s Confidential Computing solution with Red Hat OpenShift to your security stack? It is a “set it and forget it” proposition for the most part.
You need to do some upfront work to recompile your applications for WebAssembly (Wasm) to run in Enarx, and then you set up access controls for each person on the project. Once up and running, teams can focus on providing ongoing support rather than managing manual day-to-day tasks.
Over time, it becomes a small cost of doing business that no one really thinks about, but it is important to help manage and reduce risk. For regulated industries and governments, it’s critical to assure customers, citizens and regulatory bodies you’re doing all you can to protect their data.
Get started with Profian
For developers and architects, you can go to try.enarx.com to see workloads secured. For department leads and other decision-makers, go to our product page for a deeper explanation of how it all works together. From there, you can contact us for a one-on-one meeting to see how we can customize your experience.