Organizations are starting to take an interest in homomorphic encryption, which allows computation to be performed directly on encrypted data without requiring access to a secret key. While the technology isn’t new (it has been around for more than a decade), many of its implementations are, and most of the vendors are either startups or have only had products sold within the past few years. While it’s difficult to obtain precise pricing, most of these tools aren’t going to be cheap: Expect to spend at least six figures and sign multi-year contracts to get started.

I review the early products in this market for CSOonline, describe some of the typical use cases, and provide some suggestions on how to evaluate them for enterprise uses.