Authors:
Bryan Hiestand, Sales Development Manager, Global Accounts, Intel
Gary Brown, Product Marketing Cloud Lead, Intel Data Center Group
Radhika Rao, Sr. Director, Azure Infrastructure & Services, Intel Team, Microsoft
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, businesses gathered to learn how to solve problems in the cloud on Azure, including how to handle sensitive data securely in the cloud. Confidential Computing is a hot topic because today’s businesses need various controls in place around data security:
- When migrating to the cloud, you need to be in control of confidential or regulated data.
- Collaboration among multiple parties on shared analyses is imperative, while maintaining confidentiality, privacy, and compliance.
- You need strong compliance and data sovereignty programs with technology-driven safeguards.
- Application security and IP protection are imperatives, with hardware-based VM isolation and access controls,
Continued momentum of 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor-based confidential VMs on Azure
The preview of DCesv6 and ECesv6 series confidential Virtual Machines powered by 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors with Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX), announced earlier this year, continues to garner interest from Azure customers. These confidential VMs allow Azure customers to bring their most sensitive workloads to the cloud without requiring application code changes.
Confidential computing with Intel TDX provides a hardware-based trusted execution environment that facilitates the deployment of trust domains, including hardware-isolated virtual machines, which protect sensitive data and applications. With Confidential Computing, you get virtual machine isolation from the cloud stack, admins, and other tenants.
Use Case 1: Confidentiality Demonstrated with Intel on Microsoft Azure
To demonstrate how to deploy cutting-edge solutions in Azure cloud with confidential computing, two leading AI ISVs participated with Intel in a POC to showcase the power of Confidential Computing on Intel TDX-enabled hosts within Microsoft Azure.
The use case in this POC was Agentic AI for customer support ticketing, deployed across EU and US public clouds. The goal was to demonstrate how this POC could meet the requirements for data security, privacy, and sovereignty.
For this deployment, Intel and Microsoft partnered with Arqit and Kamiwaza, a member of Intel’s AI Liftoff program.
Arqit minimizes cyber risk with quantum-safe security solutions designed for on-premises, cloud, and edge environments.
Kamiwaza AI delivers powerful AI agents and orchestrates workflows across a distributed data infrastructure, all while maintaining security.
This deployment was achieved using Kamiwaza AI’s AI orchestration engine, which deploys LLMs on Azure Confidential VMs powered by Intel Xeon processors, and Arqit’s SKA, providing quantum-safe key creation for end-to-end data encryption.
This collaboration demonstrates how organizations can leverage the benefits of multi-regional public cloud and dispersed data sources while maintaining control, compliance, and cost-effectiveness.
By leveraging Arqit’s quantum-secure key encryption platform and Kamiwaza’s agentic AI framework, customer service platforms can deliver real-time, quantum-safe, and US/GDPR-compliant responses across regions and languages. The system leverages Arqit’s SKA platform to route queries based on customer tier, validate compliance, and synthesize localized responses – demonstrating tangible commercial value in cross-border support scenarios.
Use Case 2: Confidentiality in a University Research Scenario
In another example, the University of Copenhagen sought a way for on-campus scientists, researchers, and academic staff to use Microsoft Azure in a secure, compliant, and reliable manner for research projects. The University faced a challenge due to the potential risk of a data breach, given the sensitive nature of the data involved.
TDC Erhverv helped The University of Copenhagen implement a confidential landing zone for research data on Microsoft Azure, utilizing Intel® TDX to establish a secure and compliant foundation for processing highly sensitive and privacy-regulated information -- including genetic and medical data -- within a trusted execution environment that upholds full GDPR compliance. The solution enables researchers to collaborate and innovate at scale with confidence and integrity. Using this solution, the University minimizes the risk of shadow it. It reduces the burden on researchers to manage infrastructure or allocate valuable resources toward building and maintaining their own IT environments.
“For scientists, maintaining the integrity and confidentiality of data is essential. Partnering with TDC Erhverv allows us to provide solutions that are secure today and resilient enough to meet the challenges of tomorrow.”
--Morten Hansson, Security-lead University of Copenhagen
Summary: Azure Confidential Computing with Intel
Here are the key takeaways from the announcement of Azure Confidential Computing with Intel:
- Helps protect against remote/software attacks even if OS / drivers / BIOS / VMM / SMM are compromised.
- Helps increase protections for sensitive information (data/keys/etc), even if an attack has full control of the platform.
- Helps prevent in-person hardware attacks, such as memory bus snooping, memory tampering, and “cold boot” attacks, against memory contents in RAM.
- Provides an option for hardware-based attestation capabilities to measure and verify valid code and data signatures.
This diagram shows how Intel TDX works to deliver VM Isolation:
VM Isolation with Intel TDX
And the chart below summarizes the benefits of Azure Confidential Computing with Intel:
To learn more about what customers like Bosch, Thales, TDC Erhverv, and Arqit have to say about these VMs, learn about new features that are in the works, and sign up for the preview, read the Azure Confidential Computing Tech Community blog post.
Endnotes:
- Data Sharing is a Key Digital Transformation Capability
- Privilege elevation exploits are used in over 50% of insider attacks
- Identifying global privacy laws, relevant DPAs | IAPP
References:
Notices and Disclaimers
Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site.
Performance results are based on testing as of dates shown in configurations and may not reflect all publicly available updates. See backup for configuration details. No product or component can be absolutely secure.
Your costs and results may vary.
Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software, or service activation.
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