Data in Use

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What Does Data in Use Mean?

Data in use refers to data that is not simply being passively stored in a stable destination, such as a central data warehouse, but is working its way through other parts of an IT architecture.

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The idea behind protecting data in use is that data sets are vulnerable to different kinds of threats depending on where they are in an IT system. One of the most common and basic issues with protecting data in use revolves around the use of public cloud computing services.

Techopedia Explains Data in Use

Although professionals sometimes recommend techniques like end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to protect data in use, others have questioned whether total data-in-use security is ever really possible. This questions has become more important as an increasing number of companies embrace the use of software as a service (SaaS) and other third-party services that process data in the cloud.

To protect data in use, the Confidential Computing Consortium recommends a hardware-based approach to cybersecurity that allows data to stay encrypted while it is being processed in memory. This approach, which is called confidential computing, provides an additional layer of security for organizations that want to process sensitive and/or regulated data in the cloud.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.