What’s New: The Confidential Computing Consortium’s new Gramine Project is introducing its first production-ready version – Gramine 1.0 – to enable protection of sensitive workloads with Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX). Additionally, the Consortium released findings from Everest Group showing that the confidential computing market could reach $54 billion in 2026.
“Confidential computing plays a significant role in securing data in multi-cloud environments. At Intel, we are committed to accelerating innovation in this space so our customers can protect even the most sensitive datasets at all stages – whether they are at rest, in motion or in use.”
Why It Matters: Confidential computing, the protection of data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based trusted execution environment (TEE), is on the rise. The Everest Group found that the confidential computing market is projected to grow through 2026 at a compound annual growth rate of 90% to 95% in the aggressive growth scenario and 40% to 45% in the most conservative scenario. Software vendors (CSPs and ISVs) are expected to capture about 63% of the revenue share, followed by hardware providers (silicon and OEM) at about 29%, and service providers and integrators at about 6%.
Growing privacy regulations and the increase in cyberattacks are expected to drive most adoption in hardware and software segments of the market, especially in regulated industries such as banking and healthcare. Emerging technology paradigms such as multi-party computing and enterprise blockchain will also constitute a large share of the market.
As a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium, Intel works with partners and customers to build the trusted foundation for computing in a data-centric world. The Gramine Project provides several tools and infrastructure components for running unmodified applications on confidential computing platforms based on Intel SGX.
Intel SGX is the most researched, most updated and most deployed hardware-based TEE for the data center, and Gramine is one of the few frameworks that supports multi-process applications by providing a complete and secure fork implementation. It also supports Docker container integration through Gramine Shielded Containers (GSC) that automatically convert Docker images to Gramine images. Containers built with GSC can be deployed via Kubernetes for confidential containers and microservices.
About the Confidential Computing Consortium: The Confidential Computing Consortium brings together hardware vendors, cloud providers and software developers to accelerate the adoption of TEE technologies and standards. The consortium supports open-source projects that advance the use of hardware-based TEEs. For information about Everest Group’s recent research and the Confidential Computing Consortium, register on the consortium's website for a "Trends in Confidential Computing” webinar at 9 a.m. PST Nov. 10.