Quick summary of a great article:<p>Homomorphic encryption allows a provider to run computations over encrypted data. Thus we do not necessarily have to expose sensitive data to a provider in order to manipulate this data and derive insights from it.<p>The tradeoff comes in the form of increased time to compute and increased complexity in the storage, retrieval, and manipulation of the data - the provider has some general sense of what type of data is stored where, but cannot simply determine what to do by looking at the plaintext values.<p>A few companies&#x2F;research groups are working on bridging the gap between the extremes (unencrypted&#x2F;fully homomorphic encryption) in order to come up with a good compromise between security and cost.<p>&gt; Both the CryptDB and Monomi publications cited approximately 20% performance impact and neither offers full, standard SQL functionality.<p>With increased regulatory standards on the near-horizon - healthcare&#x2F;insurance in particular - research in this area holds a lot of potential, especially if they can get the overhead closer to 0% and figure out a way of safely tagging data for manipulation in a way that does not expose it to re-identification.