Duality Technologies’ perspective on Gartner’s Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2026
In its newly released report, Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2026, Gartner places Confidential Computing among the three core “Architect” technologies shaping enterprise infrastructure over the next five years.
According to Gartner:
“By 2029, more than 75% of processing operations in untrusted infrastructure will be secured in use by confidential computing.”
That’s a decisive shift: data-in-use protection is becoming the default expectation, not an experiment.
Gartner defines confidential computing as technology that “uses hardware-based trusted execution environments (TEEs) to keep data and workloads protected while in use… facilitating secure processing of sensitive data and AI, meeting strict privacy and compliance demands in any environment.”
Gartner highlights the drivers behind this acceleration: tightening privacy laws, cross-border data-transfer complexity, and the rise of AI workloads that move sensitive data through multi-party pipelines.
“Confidential computing prevents critical workloads on shared or third-party infrastructure from being accessed by any unauthorized entity, including the infrastructure provider.”
That hardware-rooted trust is why every major hyperscaler AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle is now rolling out confidential compute services. Yet Gartner warns that integrating those TEEs across heterogeneous clouds and chip architectures remains complex:
“Integrating TEEs across different chip types, cloud providers, and environments can be complex… specialized skills or third-party platforms may be needed to orchestrate and manage confidential computing as adoption grows.”
Here’s where Duality Technologies comes in.
Confidential computing protects data while it’s processed but it doesn’t automatically enable collaboration between parties or AI across silos. That next layer of value is what Duality delivers: privacy-preserving analytics and AI that run on top of any confidential infrastructure.
Duality bridges the fragmentation Gartner flags by orchestrating secure computation across heterogeneous environments from Intel TDX and AMD SEV to cloud TEEs and on-prem hardware. Organizations can run encrypted analytics or AI models jointly without moving, decrypting, or trusting counterparties.
Where Gartner calls confidential computing an “architect-level foundation,” Duality turns that foundation into a collaboration platform, a way for banks, hospitals, governments, and AI vendors to use their secured data together.
Gartner advises CIOs to “map current and future technology stacks and consider external expertise or specialized platforms to integrate confidential computing across diverse environments and providers.”
Duality delivers exactly that integration layer supporting AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and on-prem deployments natively.Customers avoid lock-in while meeting data-sovereignty, compliance, and security requirements at once.
Gartner situates confidential computing alongside AI supercomputing and AI-native development platforms as foundational enablers of the AI era. Duality extends that foundation by enabling confidential AI training and inference directly on protected data and by tying into Gartner’s other highlighted trends like AI Security Platforms and Digital Provenance to ensure end-to-end trust.
In practice, this means:
That’s the future Gartner describes and the one Duality is already operationalizing.
Gartner’s research underscores a clear truth: confidential computing will soon be everywhere. But the ability for parties to collaborate without exposing their sensitive data and model, across clouds is what will differentiate tomorrow’s AI leaders.
Duality Technologies provides that bridge turning confidential infrastructure into a collaborative, compliant, and competitive advantage.
Source: Gartner, “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2026,” Gene Alvarez et al., 18 October 2025, ID G00829643. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
