The growth of Confidential Computing

Over the last five years, Confidential Computing has evolved and matured. Today, it’s used by organizations all around the world that are concerned with protecting their systems as well as sensitive, confidential or regulated data. In fact, there’s so much confidence in the technology that some researchers expect the U.S. market to hit $5.5B this year. In this article, we’re going to review Confidential Computing technology, explore how it’s being used and examine what future innovations might look like.

Confidential Computing protects data in use during processing, with sensitive data isolated in the CPU and encrypted in memory while it’s processed. The mechanism for doing that is a secure enclave in the hardware called a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The goal is for sensitive data and trusted code to be loaded into the TEE, which protects it from tampering. This isolated and secure environment helps prevent unauthorized access and modification of in-memory applications and data, thereby increasing assurances that the data remains secure.