IBM is convinced the basis is there to do a wide variety of things with encrypted blobs, including computational arithmetic on encrypted data, which could be useful in the financial sector. Or privacy-enhancement for Web services, such as searching, which would keep search engines from building up profiles on people. And in cloud computing, it would be a way to store data so that there could be authorized processing of it without it having to be changed into cleartext and then encrypted again.

"We're in the process of working on that now," says Rao. The goal is that "if end users are submitting private and sensitive information in the cloud," they would know that data would be kept confidential as encrypted blobs. "We're now figuring out how to do this in ," he says, but adds that IBM is not at the stage to announce products or services yet.

in Network World's Data Center section.