Homomorphic Encryption... A Game Changer?

In his book titled, Does IT Matter, Nicholas Carr argues "information technology has increasingly become [...] a simple factor of production - a commodity input that is necessary for competitiveness but insufficient for advantage." While his argument is elegant in its simplicity and curiously attractive in it's citing of major technological advances as a "commodity" required to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace, I believe his perspective on IT as the "cost of doing business" also identifies the direct enabler of the modern day business advantage - data. 

In today's markets, the ability to generate meaning from consumer and business critical data has become the centerpiece of Fortune 500 companies because it supports rational decision making. It has almost become a requirement for companies to have a data collection and analysis capability in regards to its consumers and internal business functions in order to maintain a competitive advantage, and thus turn a profit. Companies like IBM who develop and sell business intelligence tools to search for meaning in data, Amazon and Salesforce that providing data storage, and Google that provides data collection and aggregation have become giants in their respective markets because of the ability to recognize the value of data. 

Interestingly enough, what may be just as important as the data itself is its availability and confidentiality. In order to make rational decisions in real-time, corporate executives require immediate access to that data in order to address time critical issues that may have immense impact on their business model and subsequently provide them a competitive advantage over the competition. Cloud computing has provided the corporate executive availability. However, while most executives realize that implementing cloud-computing solutions may ultimately give them access to the data when they need it, executives are also reluctant to place their data in the cloud because of security issues. In an article titled, "Homomorphic Encryption: Making Cloud Computing More Secure  (http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37197/) the writers of Technology Review at MIT have exposed what seems to be the emerging technology that will remove executives' reluctance to accept cloud computing as a holistic IT solution to information exchange - homomorphic encryption. 

IBM's Craig Gentry has come close to perfecting the ability to run mathematical calculations on encrypted data without exposing the content of the data to anyone but the data owner. This break through in data confidentiality will definitely change the level of comfortability that businesses and consumers have with placing their data in the cloud and could have massive impacts on the way executive decision makers lead their organizations and develop SaaS products. Imagine the ability for patients to place their medical data in the cloud in a secure, wireless, real-time fashion where a health provider could use it make life saving decisions remotely or dispatch first responders faster to provide medical services. I see homomorphic encryption as a technology that will quickly become a game changer for service provision in the very near future.