Major technology companies, such as Google, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Baidu, IBM, and Alibaba, announced the formation of a a reliable computing union to improve data security.

It is common to secure data when storing or moving to its destination, but not when it is actually used, and technology companies are collaborating to develop open source technologies and standards that accelerate the adoption of reliable computing.

Created by Linux, the foundation plans to bring together hardware vendors, developers, open source experts and others to promote the use of reliable computing, develop common open source standards, and better protect data.

The Linux Foundation said in a joint statement : “Reliable computing focuses on securing data in use, and current methods often address how data is secured during data storage and transmission over the network”. And she added : “Encrypting data in use is the most difficult step in providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data”.

The group said the group was formed because reliable computing would become more important, as more organizations moved between different environments, such as the public cloud; or local servers.

Technology companies have made a series of open source project contributions, including the Intel Framework for Business (SGX), a software development group (SDK) to protect code in the hardware layer using protected pockets.

Microsoft has contributed to the Open Enclave SDK, which allows developers to write code and build applications to run within trusted execution environments (TEE).

IBM’s Red Hat contributed through Enarx’s partnership to run TEE applications, a tool to summarize secure environments to the extent that private applications can be created and run without a server.