Confidential Computing in 2026: Cyberus Technology Publishes Comprehensive Technical Report on Usability, Market, and Technology Readiness

We just published a major technical report on the current state of Confidential Computing. Download the full report on HAL Open Science.

Why Another Report on Confidential Computing?

Most literature on Confidential Computing (CC) falls into one of three categories: performance benchmarking, vulnerability analysis, or research on potential improvements. What has been largely missing is a structured, practitioner-facing reference that addresses usability, business value, technology readiness, and realistic deployment expectations in a single document.

“Confidential Computing Revisited: Usability, Market, Standpoints and Trends” draws on product documentation, technical specifications, peer-reviewed publications, and direct interviews with professionals from more than 20 partner organizations. The result is a report that speaks to both engineering teams evaluating CC for deployment and decision-makers assessing its strategic value.

Technical Scope: Virtualization-Based Confidential Computing

The report centers on virtualization-based Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) introduced in the 2022 to 2023 timeframe: AMD SEV-SNP (Secure Encrypted Virtualization, Secure Nested Paging) and Intel TDX (Trust Domain Extensions), both targeting the x86-64 architecture.

These technologies allow standard virtual machines to run inside hardware-enforced, encrypted memory regions, ensuring that neither the hypervisor, host OS, nor cloud operator can access the workload or its data. Virtualization-based confidential computing enables lift-and-shift scenarios without requiring modifications to application code, making adoption significantly more tractable for cloud providers and enterprise customers alike. The report also highlights relevant open-source frameworks complementing these CPU technologies, in the spirit of the ApeiroRA project and the NeoNephos Foundation.

Key Findings

Market trajectory. Market projections vary by analyst but all point in the same direction. The most conservative estimate puts CAGR above 25%; more aggressive forecasts reach 56% to 63%. Gartner named CC in their Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2026 and predicts that 75% of workloads in untrusted infrastructure will be secured by CC by 2029, driven by stricter privacy laws, data localization requirements, and AI adoption. The underlying drivers are structural: escalating threats to businesses, critical infrastructure, and supply chains are creating sustained demand for hardware-rooted, verifiable confidentiality guarantees that contractual controls alone cannot provide.

Regulatory landscape. The report identifies more than 30 relevant security and privacy standards, consortia, and regulatory frameworks. For organizations operating under GDPR, NIS2, or sector-specific regulations in finance, healthcare, or the public sector, CC is increasingly relevant not just as a security control, but as a compliance enabler.

Usability and deployment friction. Three challenge areas are identified for customers and service providers. OS dependencies remain a factor, as kernel support for AMD SEV-SNP and Intel TDX is still maturing across distributions. VM lifecycle management introduces operational complexity around provisioning, key management, live migration constraints, and snapshot handling. Remote attestation, the mechanism by which a relying party cryptographically verifies a workload is running in a genuine TEE on legitimate hardware, remains one of the most difficult aspects to implement correctly in production, particularly in multi-cloud environments.

Vulnerability landscape. The report does not shy away from the security track record of the technology. An analysis of CVEs up to mid-2024 found 58 tracked issues across Intel TDX and AMD SEV-SNP, with 81% being host-to-guest attack vectors. The majority are linked to firmware (53%) and insufficient input validation (38%). The take-away from the report is direct: regular CVE monitoring and firmware updates are not optional, they are a prerequisite for keeping CC operational.

Industry perspectives. Based on interviews with 40+ professionals, the report categorizes the industry into optimists, realists, and skeptics. The realist cohort is the largest: practitioners who have run proof-of-concepts, place CC at a medium technology readiness level, and are actively preparing their organizations for broader deployment within the next few years. The report derives specific calls-to-action from each perspective.

Cyberus Technology’s Role

This report was produced as part of SAP’s Apeiro Reference Architecture contribution to the IPCEI-CIS EU project (Important Projects of Common European Interest, Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services), in which Cyberus Technology GmbH acts as development and consultation partner. SAP has committed to donating all of Apeiro to the NeoNephos Foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation Europe.

Read the Full Report

The complete report is available on HAL Open Science under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

Download “Confidential Computing Revisited: Usability, Market, Standpoints and Trends”