AWO Rheingau-Taunus embeds security and compliance into its infrastructure with enclaive

When it comes to digitalisation, organisations in the public sector often have to balance high data protection standards, limited budgets and a shortage of IT specialists. At the same time, there is a growing desire for greater digital independence from major foreign providers.

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AWO Kreisverband Rheingau-Taunus faced these very challenges. The independent organisation employs 300 permanent staff and works with a further 150 volunteers, operating four day-care centres and more than 20 schools across the Rheingau-Taunus district in Hessia, Germany, and the state capital Wiesbaden. In 2023, for reasons of cost and data protection, the organisation decided to move away from operating its own server and migrate its email communications and entire digital infrastructure, including all data, to an open-source solution. As part of the project, enclaive implemented a Confidential Computing architecture.

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AWO Rheingau-Taunus' email server and its individual components now run in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs, also called enclaves): encrypted environments within the CPU. Remote attestation provides technical proof that data is being processed confidentially. The new setup reduces costs to around one third of the previous operating model.

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