Confidential VM
IONOS CLOUD Confidential VM encrypts your VM's memory at the CPU level. Even with full administrative access to the physical host, the hypervisor sees only ciphertext.
It protects data in use, the third state of data that standard encryption does not cover. Encryption at rest protects stored data, and encryption in transit protects data moving over a network. Confidential VM closes the remaining gap by protecting data while it's being processed in memory.
Built for regulated industries, including financial services, healthcare, and legal that require cryptographic guarantees over contractual ones, this zero-trust architecture provides:
Hardware-Level Isolation: Workloads run in a runs in a hardware-enforced Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) using AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization with Secure Nested Paging (AMD SEV-SNP) technology ensuring the hypervisor sees only ciphertext. For more information, see Use Cases.
Exclusive Control: IONOS CLOUD provides the physical host, hypervisor, and network. You retain complete control over your operating system, applications, encryption keys, and attestation policies.
Immediate Availability: Directly available to all users in the Frankfurt-East
de/fra/2data center.
Important:
Confidential VMs are currently available in the Frankfurt-East
de/fra/2data center. To deploy, ensure you have an active IONOS CLOUD account in this location.Because Confidential VMs are designed to completely isolate your data from the underlying infrastructure, IONOS CLOUD has zero visibility into your encrypted environment. Consequently, our technical support is strictly limited by the product's design, and we cannot assist with in-guest operating system, application, or key management issues.
Why IONOS CLOUD Confidential VM
Confidential VM replaces that trust requirement with a cryptographic proof. Using remote attestation, you can verify the TEE's exact state, including the firmware, configuration, and startup measurements, before exposing sensitive data to it. No policy document or audit report is required.
IONOS CLOUD provides the infrastructure layer that enables this security:
AMD EPYC processors with SEV-SNP: Runs on AMD EPYC processors with SEV-SNP (a hardware security feature built for confidential workloads), providing memory isolation between VMs and the hypervisor layer.
Secure launch infrastructure: Reads the launch artifacts directly from your image and starts the Confidential VM under hardware-enforced isolation, preventing patching, injection, or inspection during launch.
Validated image upload: Images are verified at upload time to confirm the
LAUNCH_ARTIFACTSpartition is correctly formed before the asset is registered.
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