KT Corporation uses Azure Confidential Computing AMD based v6 Confidential VMs to protect sensitive workloads in the public cloud, delivering higher performance and stronger customer confidence.
A leading South Korea telecom provider, KT Corporation, serves more than 20 million consumers and thousands of enterprise customers in finance, manufacturing, and the public sector. As businesses across the country undergo digital transformation, KT needed to expand its cloud offerings but faced hurdles from government regulations and customer expectations.
Data security: Caution and compliance
Expanding cloud applications presented several challenges. South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) imposes strict requirements on how organizations handle personal data, placing limits on cross-border transfers without explicit consent.
At the same time, many of KT’s customers remain wary of the public cloud and hesitant to share data due to security concerns. “In Korea, sovereignty and privacy aren’t merely government regulations,” says Sungkwon Kang, senior vice president and head of cloud at KT. “They are fundamental service requirements of key customers.”
Many of the company’s applications store and process personally identifiable information - data that is both highly sensitive and tightly regulated. KT already used standard encryption for data at rest and in transit, but leaders still worried that data in use could be vulnerable to attack.
To move forward, KT needed a way to assure business customers of end-to-end confidentiality, integrity, and compliance without sacrificing the scale and agility of public cloud.
Secure Public Cloud service with Azure Confidential Computing
In partnership with Microsoft and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), KT built a next-generation Secure Public Cloud service powered by Azure Confidential Computing (ACC). ACC protects data in use, encrypting information in RAM and during computation. It also enforces strict hardware attestation, key management, and cryptographic guarantees. “Only the data owner can access the data,” explains Youngmin Kim, senior vice president and head of IT development at KT.
KT has already migrated critical workloads to this secure public cloud, including its personal information management services. That migration took about six months, and the environment is now stable and running smoothly. The effort now serves as KT’s reference architecture as the company moves additional services onto the platform.
Throughout the transition, KT prioritized customers’ sovereignty requirements. “We store customer data in-region, with transparency and sovereignty controls built into the Azure platform,” says Kang. The same foundation supports KT’s AI scenarios, enabling customers to adopt advanced capabilities with confidence.
Performance increases and greater trust
KT’s goal in adopting ACC was to give its public-sector and financial customers the confidence to embrace cloud services without hesitation. Strong, verifiable data protection helps build that trust.
To support this vision, KT is working closely with manufacturing, financial, and public-sector organizations to increase transparency through service validations and ongoing technology briefings with Microsoft. “We’re building a cloud ecosystem where even the most sensitive organizations can confidently embrace digital and AI transformation with us,” says Kang. We want customers to trust Azure services as much as their own data centers, knowing they have the same level of security control, transparency, and compliance.
To support its secure cloud architecture, KT has adopted ACC v6 Confidential Virtual Machines, which run on AMD’s fourth-generation EPYC Genoa processors. With the new VMs, KT is already seeing performance improvements of 15–60% over v5 in similar scenarios.
KT is also expanding its software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, including AI-driven services for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer customers. Like other shared services, SaaS requires customers to store data in the public cloud, raising similar security concerns. To enhance security and build customer trust, KT is building its SaaS services on Azure, using ACC to protect sensitive data in use. “We’re delivering bolder innovations with stronger protections,” says Kang.
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