San Francisco, Sep 10 (IANS): Google Cloud has expanded its confidential virtual machines (VMs) portfolio that will provide encrypted services where users can be confident that their data is not being exposed to cloud providers or their own insiders.

Confidential Computing makes this future possible by keeping data encrypted in memory, and elsewhere outside the CPU, while it is being processed.

The company in July announced the Beta availability of Confidential VMs, the first product in its Confidential Computing portfolio.

"Confidential GKE Nodes" are the second product in Google confidential computing portfolio and will soon be available in beta, starting with the GKE 1.18 release.

This gives organisations additional options for confidential workloads when they want to utilize Kubernetes clusters with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

"We're also making Confidential VMs generally available. This capability will be available to all Google Cloud customers in the coming weeks and will include new features we've added during beta," Sunil Potti, General Manager/VP of Engineering, Cloud Security said in a blog post.

Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystem, AMD said: "with AMD EPYC processors and Google Cloud's Confidential Computing portfolio we are helping to keep customers' data secure so they can feel confident that they can easily move their applications to the cloud".

Confidential VMs use memory encryption to further isolate workloads and tenants from each other, and from the cloud infrastructure.

It provides an easy-to-use option, for both lift-and-shift and newly created workloads, to protect the memory of workloads in Google Compute Engine, Google said.