8. It Ensures Data Integrity Through Decentralized Infrastructure
Decentralized cloud computing ensures data integrity by offering on-demand resources managed by independent parties, allowing clients to pay only for what they use. Unlike centralized clouds, where data shards are mutable, decentralized nodes make shards immutable and cryptographically secured, preventing unauthorized reconstruction. – Daniel Keller, InFlux Technologies Limited (FLUX)
As cloud computing becomes more common, businesses have had to contend with the challenge of protecting sensitive data during processing. Confidential computing addresses this by keeping data in use contained within secure hardware environments.
While stronger security is the key benefit, the technology can also open the door to new revenue and collaboration opportunities, support compliance efforts and, in some cases, reduce long-term processing costs. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council detail valuable benefits organizations can gain by adopting confidential computing.
1. It Provides True End-To-End Protection
Confidential computing protects data while in use—the missing piece in cloud security. Unlike standard encryption for data in transit and storage, it keeps information encrypted even during processing, creating true end-to-end protection against sophisticated threats and adding crucial defense-in-depth for the most sensitive customer data. – Sandeep Gundapaneni
2. It Reduces The Attack Surface For Sensitive Data Processing
Confidential computing drastically reduces the attack surface for sensitive data processing in the cloud. By isolating computations within hardware-based encrypted enclaves (Trusted Execution Environments, or TEEs), it protects data in use even if the host operating system or hypervisor is compromised. This critically minimizes risks associated with privileged access, including potential threats from cloud provider insiders. – Pradeep Kumar Muthukamatchi, Microsoft
3. It Unlocks New Revenue And Innovation Opportunities
Confidential computing unlocks new revenue opportunities and accelerates innovation by enabling broader access to sensitive data for collaborative analytics and AI development. It ensures that data remains protected throughout its life cycle, preserving security and privacy even during processing. – Sujay Jaladi, FalconX
4. It Reduces The Risk Of Data Exposure
Confidential computing provides the ability to process sensitive data in the cloud while keeping it completely encrypted during computation. This significantly reduces the risk of data exposure even from the cloud provider itself, making it a game-changer for industries handling regulated or proprietary data. – Jagbir Kaur, Google
5. It Simplifies Compliance With Global Privacy Laws
The biggest advantage can be simplified data protection. Data processed in the context of confidential computing may fall outside the scope of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. This makes it possible to process the data without a specific legal basis: Data subjects do not need to be informed of this, and the data privacy purpose limitation does not need to be observed either. This can make IT compliance much easier. – Dennis-Kenji Kipker, cyberintelligence.institute
6. It Prevents Vendor Data Mining
Running sensitive data in a confidential cloud offers significant compliance benefits, often meeting mandatory requirements. The risk of cross-access is too high in public clouds, where vendors may mine your data for their own purposes. – Osmany Barrinat, SecureNet MSP
7. It Enables Secure, Selective Data Access
The advantage of confidential computing is that it allows secure access to sensitive data in shared cloud environments through fine-grained access control. It enables selective authorization within isolated hardware-based enclaves, which ensures confidential projects or proprietary designs remain accessible only to explicitly authorized groups. This reduces data leakage risks and enhances secure collaboration. – Dhruv Seth, Walmart Global Tech
8. It Ensures Data Integrity Through Decentralized Infrastructure
Decentralized cloud computing ensures data integrity by offering on-demand resources managed by independent parties, allowing clients to pay only for what they use. Unlike centralized clouds, where data shards are mutable, decentralized nodes make shards immutable and cryptographically secured, preventing unauthorized reconstruction. – Daniel Keller, InFlux Technologies Limited (FLUX)
9. It Meets Stringent Regulatory Requirements
Confidential computing provides trusted execution environments to isolate and secure data during processing. This supports meeting stringent regulatory requirements like HIPAA, GDPR, CMMC and PCI-DSS, even for AI/ML workloads with highly sensitive datasets. With confidential computing, organizations can protect their data while enjoying the flexibility and innovation of the cloud. – Kim Bozzella, Protiviti
10. It Keeps Data Encrypted At Every Stage
Confidential computing allows data to be encrypted in multiple stages: at rest, in transit and while in process. Companies generally want their intellectual property and sensitive data to remain encrypted even in untrusted environments. This creates a secure environment for sharing with others, across jurisdictions or otherwise. – Asad Khan, LambdaTest Inc.
11. It Reduces Processing Costs And Operational Risk
Adopting confidential computing helps organizations not only improve data processing operations across business networks, but also reduce the risk for service errors. From an IT leadership perspective, data processing has typically required high data movement costs. Cloud solutions can help minimize costs and facilitate the sharing of data across an entire organization. – Guillaume Aymé, Lenses.io
12. It’s A More Comprehensive Data Security Approach
Confidential computing is set to transform how organizations protect sensitive data, especially in the cloud. As reliance on data-driven decisions grows, securing data during processing becomes crucial. This marks a major shift from traditional models—which are focused only on data at rest and in transit—toward a comprehensive approach that also safeguards data in use. – Sreekanth Narayan, LTIMindtree
13. It Lets Organizations Process Sensitive Data Without Trusting Cloud Providers
One major advantage of adopting confidential computing is that it lets organizations process sensitive data in the cloud without fully trusting the cloud provider. It’s like having a secure vault inside someone else’s house. This enables safer cloud adoption for regulated industries like finance or healthcare, unlocking cloud scalability without sacrificing data privacy or compliance. – Gaurav Mehta
14. It Enables Cross-Organizational Data Collaboration
Enabling cross-organizational data sharing for advanced business intelligence is a key benefit of confidential computing. For example, sharing data between hospitals, research institutes and pharmaceutical companies can accelerate medical research, resulting in better drugs and patient care. Or, sharing data between financial institutions could create novel ways of identifying fraud. – Anujkumarsinh Donvir, ADP
15. It Creates Verifiable Audit Trails For Compliance
Confidential computing enables organizations to create verifiable audit trails of data usage during processing, not just access. This fosters trust from regulators and partners by proving compliance in real time, unlocking new business models that rely on provable data integrity in sensitive, high-stakes environments like finance, defense and pharmaceuticals. – Andres Zunino, ZirconTech
16. It Facilitates Secure Cross-Border Healthcare Innovation
The game-changing advantage of confidential computing that’s often overlooked is its ability to unlock cross-border data collaboration. Healthcare organizations can leverage this technology to securely analyze patient data across international boundaries while maintaining compliance. It’s not just about protection—it’s about enabling innovation that was previously impossible. – Marc Fischer, Dogtown Media LLC
17. It Enables The Training Of AI Models Without Exposing Sensitive Data
Confidential computing enables AI models to be trained on sensitive data without exposing the raw inputs, preserving privacy while improving performance. It’s not just about protecting data; it’s about building ethical, auditable AI systems that organizations can trust and regulators can verify. – Albert Lie, Forward Labs
18. It Ensures Intrinsic Compliance
A key advantage is dynamic policy enforcement at the hardware layer. Confidential computing enables organizations to define fine-grained, cryptographically enforced access rules that follow the data wherever it’s processed. This ensures compliance is intrinsic, not externally imposed, even across complex hybrid-cloud ecosystems. – Jagadish Gokavarapu, Wissen Infotech
19. It Empowers Secure, Industry- And Border-Crossing Collaboration
Through confidential computing, sensitive data can be processed with unparalleled security and transparency, enabling previously unimaginable levels of innovation and collaboration. In the future, confidential computing will empower organizations to securely share and analyze sensitive data across industries and borders, driving breakthroughs in fields like healthcare, finance and AI. – Pooja Jain, Meta (Facebook)