Question 1

What's the difference between Confidential Computing and encryption at rest/in transit?

Accepted Answer

Encryption at rest protects data stored on disks, and encryption in transit protects data moving over networks. Confidential Computing adds protection for data while it’s being processed in memory (data in use) by running code inside a hardware-protected environment (a TEE). This helps prevent access even from highly privileged system software or cloud administrators.

Question 2

When should I use Confidential Computing?

Accepted Answer

Use it when you handle highly sensitive data (PII, PHI, financial data, proprietary models) and want stronger guarantees that the cloud infrastructure and administrators can’t access data in memory. It’s especially useful for multi-party analytics (sharing insights without sharing raw data), regulated workloads, and scenarios where you need cryptographic attestation before releasing keys or secrets to a workload.

Question 3

How much does Confidential Computing cost?

Accepted Answer

Costs typically come from (1) using specific confidential VM/instance types or node pools, which may be priced differently than standard compute, and (2) potential performance overhead depending on the TEE technology and workload. You may also incur costs for supporting services like KMS/HSM, attestation/verification services, and additional engineering effort to adapt applications (for example, enclave-aware networking or splitting apps into trusted/untrusted components). Exact pricing varies by provider, region, and instance size.

Confidential Computing

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