Disaster Recovery Journal Summer 2025

processing power compared to standard encryption and has a complex program ming model that is unfamiliar to current and soon-to-graduate programmers. In practice, this means: n Higher cloud infrastructure costs (compute, storage, and bandwidth), potentially necessitating new “encrypted cloud” pricing models to account for increased demands. n Longer processing times, making real time applications difficult. n The need for specialized hardware accelerators to make FHE commercially viable. Reduced perimeter security require ments will offset some of the infrastruc ture costs, but realistically, FHE will see adoption first in applications with highly sensitive data and/or extremely stringent regulatory constraints. Fortunately, the first commercial FHE hardware accelera tors are slated to hit the market this year, which will significantly narrow the pro cessing time gaps and clear the path for commercial implementations.

Still, deploying FHE at scale requires specialized cryptographic expertise. Unlike traditional encryption, which is well understood by security teams, FHE demands new software frameworks and API layers to interface with existing sys tems. Training and hiring cryptography experts could be a significant bottleneck to FHE implementation—look for FHE hardware and software providers to offer implementation as a service in order to grease the wheels in 2025. FHE Innovation: Cross-Industry Collaboration Will Be Key Open-source FHE projects like Microsoft’s SEAL, IBM’s HELib, and Duality’s OpenFHE have driven FHE research forward, but commercial adop tion requires enterprise-grade support and standardization. Collaborative efforts will ensure FHE moves beyond academia into real-world deployments. The FHE Technical Consortium for Hardware (FHETCH) was launched in late 2024 to create interoperability standards across software, hardware, cloud providers, and end-users. Their work on a unified API

abstraction layer will make FHE easier to integrate and deploy, accelerating adoption. 2025 marks the turning point for FHE from a theoretical innovation to a commer cial necessity. While challenges remain, the combination of hardware acceleration, regulatory pressures, and industry collabo ration is laying the foundation for a secure, privacy-centric digital ecosystem. As organizations seek to balance data security, AI adoption, and compliance, FHE will emerge as a fundamental pillar of modern privacy-enhancing computing. In the new data economy, the organiza tions that protect their assets by prioritiz ing privacy will be the ones that thrive. v

David Archer, Ph.D., is chief technology officer of Niobium Microsystems, maker of cutting-edge hardware acceleration for pri vacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), and the first company to develop ASIC-based

accelerators for fully homomorphic encryption. Archer has more than 40 years of research and development experi ence in system hardware and software architecture, secure computation, cryptography, and data-intensive systems. Archer holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Portland State University, a master’s degree in electrical engineer ing and a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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