About Roseman Labs
Roseman Labs is revolutionizing encrypted computing, and their mission is to enable organizations to unlock insights from sensitive data to solve global challenges. Our platform allows you to use sensitive data in a secure way, whilst safeguarding individual and commercial privacy. The software employs a cryptographic technology called Multi-Party Computation that encrypts data from beginning to end. This enables data owners to stay in control of their data, enhancing privacy compliance through data minimization and purpose binding.
Can you introduce yourself and explain your role on the team?
My name is Tom Hemmes, I am the lead DevOps engineer at Roseman Labs. Our team works on automating the operation of our hosted and on-premises product and the underlying infrastructure. Meanwhile, we’re constantly learning new things that help our Development teams to further improve the product.
How is Roseman Lab different from other players?
We set ourselves apart in several ways:
- Solving real problems for real customers: We are deliberate in doing research on problems that really make a difference. Roseman Labs supports customers working to improve patient care, enhance the detection of child abuse and support educational development. The continued impact our platform generates means customers often continue to work with us beyond their initial projects.
- Strong technical and commercial team: Our team consists of not only PhD-level cryptographers, but also a diligent team of designers, engineers and commercial professionals that make the complex technology simple to understand, use and integrate into customers’ existing processes and workflows.
- Expanding functionality: Through a familiar Python interface and through the efforts of our cryptography team, customers have 50+ ready to use functionalities — ranging from basic operations to machine learning and more advanced AI models, some of which are world-firsts, including regex on encrypted text. These features unlock previously inaccessible information without compromising data privacy, offering organizations more detailed insights or predictions into time efficiency, product effectiveness, cost savings, resource allocation, and risk analysis.
Deep-Tech from the Netherlands: Whilst still a young startup, we are recognized within the Privacy-Tech space for the impact we make, having recently won the 2024 Dutch Privacy Award.
Why is it important for you to work with a European cloud?
Many of our customers handle sensitive data of EU citizens using our software, so we care deeply about treating sensitive data correctly.
Roseman Labs emphasizes and encourages strong data privacy practices, which are mirrored by the stringent EU regulatory environment we operate in.
While our product provides technical safeguards that ensure that cloud providers cannot read sensitive data, the privacy impact assessments are simpler when opting for EU-owned clouds by not having to deal with the overhead of exporting data outside of the European Economic Area (EEA).
Why are Data Sovereignty, Data Portability and GDPR so important for Roseman Labs?
Data sovereignty, data portability and GDPR are key in the digital landscape, ensuring that information is handled responsibly, transparently, and in a manner that respects individual rights and national laws. These principles and regulations help build a foundation of trust and security essential for the digital world’s functioning. Roseman Labs intrinsically cares about doing privacy right, so we observe these principles by ensuring strong legal compliance, promoting user control and transparency, and building trust through accountability.
People and organizations should be in control of their data, and technical measures should be in place to safeguard this. Our solution makes privacy-enhanced data collaborations a reality.
The product
Can you tell us what solution Roseman Labs provides and who your customers are?
Roseman Labs enables you to encrypt, link and analyze multiple data sets, while safeguarding the privacy and commercial sensitivity of the underlying data. You can combine information from several sources, run analyses on records at a granular level, and generate new insights – all without ever being able to view the input. Organizations get the insights they need, while the data stays protected.
Our customers are in industries such as Healthcare, Financial Services and the Public Sector. Some examples include the Dutch National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) who combines data from public and private partners to investigate the nature and scale of cyber attacks, and the Municipality of Rotterdam who combines sensitive data from daycare organizations to ensure the educational development of young children.
You are using three different (GaiaX) Cloud Providers, can you tell more about that choice?
Our product uses encrypted computing. Contrary to other products, the sensitive data of our customers is never stored in a centralized location and never decrypted. We deploy our technology across three different EU-owned cloud providers so that no single cloud provider or administrator can compromise the confidentiality of the data being processed. Fuga is one of those cloud providers.
How did you end up at Fuga Cloud?
There are four important requirements for us to consider a cloud provider for our network:
- A managed Kubernetes offering: Roseman Labs relies on multiple cloud providers, so we use Kubernetes as an abstraction layer to simplify our deployment processes.
- Pay-as-you-go: As a startup, software improvements and new customers can cause our usage to fluctuate, so it’s important not to be locked into long-term contracts.
- EU-owned: Our customers handle data of European citizens; therefore, it is an advantage that cloud providers that handle customer data fall under European regulations.
- Certifications: Roseman Labs is ISO27001 certified, and we hold our service providers to the same standards to maintain customer trust in information security across the software supply chain.
What solutions did you evaluate before choosing Fuga Cloud?
We evaluated several European cloud providers such as Scaleway, OVH, Fuga Cloud, Exoscale, and American cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform and Azure. Fuga was among the first set of European cloud providers we adopted for our network.
What were the results and shortcomings you were seeing from other Providers?
We have run into issues with usage quotas on certain machine types with other cloud providers (specifically, machine types with high memory). Such issues delay the workflow of our team, but with Fuga Cloud we have not run into such quotas.
We also experienced limits on the number of disks we can mount to machines at other cloud providers, but at Fuga these limits are much higher.
Implementation
What were the planning and steps during the implementation?
When we adopt a new cloud provider, we first explore the offered technologies through the web interface. From creating an organization and setting up billing, to creating Kubernetes clusters, load balancers and object storage buckets.
Then we validate support for infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) with Terraform by applying our modules to create a development environment. With such an environment we can connect to our other cloud providers to validate networking configuration and create workloads to test the limitations. Once we have completed all our testing scenarios, we will start configuring the production environments and gradually move workloads to the new cloud provider.
How helpful was the online documentation?
Throughout our adoption, the support team has improved the documentation. Specifically, Terraform support to create or edit Kubernetes clusters was lacking at first, but has since been added.
How much did you need to use the help of the support team?
The support team supported us in the adoption process. We found that when we ran into issues, we could open a direct support channel with Fuga Cloud. In particular, we received a private Slack channel in which a qualified Fuga engineer is quick to respond. This has proven faster and more effective than support tickets at other cloud providers.
What do you like about Fuga Cloud?
We like the direct Slack channel with the Fuga support team which allows us to easily reach out in case of issues and get a quick response. We hope to use it less and less in the future, but it has been great so far.
In your experience with Fuga Cloud, are there any areas where you feel we could do better?
The website, and specifically user sessions, can use improvement; it sometimes requires logging out and logging back in to load certain resources, like showing our configured IP addresses or Kubernetes clusters. (In the meantime Fuga made a significant upgrade to the cloud platform’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) system to solve this issue. – Editorial note)
What have been the achievements since you started using Fuga Cloud?
Fuga, together with two other European clouds, enables us to provide a hosted product offering. We have seen rapid growth of our hosted product during the past year. Many of our customers use or start out with our hosted product because it enables them to get started quickly and discover the value of encrypted computing.
The Roseman Labs team
Next steps
What are the next steps for Roseman Labs?
As we head towards our Series A investment, Roseman Labs is preparing to scale internationally targeting sectors that want to securely compute sensitive data. According to Gartner, 1% of Generative AI models today use domain-specific data, and this will be 50% by 2027. To facilitate this growth, access to more sensitive data is necessary. Roseman Labs offers a solution to unlock insights from sensitive data securely.
How do you plan to grow with Fuga Cloud?
Our hosted product will continue to evolve in the coming years. With the growth in the number of customers, we expect to scale our Kubernetes clusters and related services such as storage and networking.
