Security News > 2022 > July > Microsoft Azure now has confidential VMs with ephemeral storage
Microsoft has expanded its confidential computing offering and now allows Azure cloud computing service customers to create hardware isolated virtual machines with Ephemeral OS disks.
With this new public preview feature, Azure customers can create ephemeral OS disks only on the local VM storage, thus ensuring that data remains 100% confidential since it will never be sent to remote Azure Storage.
Microsoft says ephemeral disks are supported by Marketplace, custom images, and Azure Compute Gallery.
Ephemeral disks are free and, just as persistent OS disks, they're also available in all Azure regions.
Azure customers who decide to use confidential VMs with ephemeral OS disks should know that they also come with a list of unsupported features, including capturing VM images, disk snapshots, Azure Disk Encryption, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and OS Disk Swap.
"As part of our commitment to delivering the best possible value for Azure confidential computing, we're announcing the support to create confidential VMs using Ephemeral OS disks," the Azure team announced Tuesday.