Confidential Computing as a Business Enabler in the Public Sector

The digitalisation of public administration opens up significant business opportunities for system integrators and managed service providers — provided they can meet the sector's rigorous security requirements. In practice, this means migrating highly sensitive government applications into modern cloud architectures without compromising data protection obligations and federal or state sovereignty. This is where conventional security approaches fall short: they leave data unprotected during processing and can only guarantee the required operator exclusion through contractual agreements, not technical enforcement.

Confidential computing closes this gap by encrypting data at rest, in transit and, crucially, in use. By utilising hardware-based, isolated trusted execution environments, this technology ensures that neither infrastructure providers nor administrators can access data while it is being processed. For IT service providers, this makes client data sovereignty verifiable, strengthening trust with public authorities and significantly accelerating approval processes.

The Register-as-a-Service project by GovTech Deutschland and FITKO serves as the practical reference case in this solution brief. It demonstrates how complex specialised registers, such as trade registries, can be protected in the cloud with high performance and legal certainty. The solution from the winning consortium, which included enclaive, was recognised as particularly robust and now serves as an open reference implementation to drive nationwide registry modernisation.

Through this case study, system integrators and managed service providers will learn what a confidential computing architecture looks like in practice, which components are used, and the technical and economic advantages it offers.