"That's the vision," says J.R. Rao, IBM's senior manager for secure software and services at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He notes that breakthrough mathematical work in fully homomorphic encryption done by IBM researcher is providing a "foundation for the encrypted path" that IBM hopes will radically improve how data can be kept secret and confidential.

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But Rao acknowledges the feeling that it's all still a bit like the Wright brothers' first flight in aviation, with some practical developments needed before everyone climbs on board.

Today, data can be encrypted using a variety of techniques, but in order to do anything that might have to be done with the data, it's necessary to decrypt it. "Today, to work with data, you have to work with data in the clear," Rao notes. "And that can be a problem." Instead, the idea is to create "encrypted blobs" that don't have to be decrypted and still allow for many practical by being combined with and processed by other encrypted blobs. "But you know what's encrypted in the blobs," says Rao. 

But others don't. With what has been ground-breaking development work in fully homomorphic encryption, it's possible.